Oh! My Aching Back!
March 16th, 2011 | Author: admin
DO YOU suffer from back pain? If so, you have a lot of company. In the United States, it is estimated that there are more than seven million persons at any one time who are going to doctors because of back pain. Each year sees up to two million new sufferers. Annually more than a half million back injuries cost employers one billion (a thousand million) dollars. In fact, it is reported that back pain is the second most frequent reason why Americans go to a doctor.
Causes of Back Pain
What is the cause of it? Why is it increasing? What can you do if you suffer from back pains?
According to a leading orthopedic surgeon (Dr. R. Addison): “Some people’s backs look beautiful on the tests, but they hurt like [everything]. Others are walking around with gross deformities that don’t seem to bother them a bit. There is a lot about back pain we don’t know, to say the least.”
Secondly, “referred pain” may be the cause of the backache. That is, while the pain may be felt in the back, it could be one of the internal organs that is to blame. Syphilis, cancer or other disease conditions also can cause referred back pain.
And thirdly, a spinal deformity or some other primary disease, either inherited or acquired through the years, can cause back pain.
A Symptom of a General Condition?
However, there are others in the field of orthopedic surgery who, while granting that perhaps as many as 20 percent of back pains might be due to the above causes, view backaches as the symptom of a general condition. According to these, the industrial or auto accident, the lifting, the stretching, the quick or sudden movement on the part of the housewife or nurse that brought on the pain are most likely only the precipitating factors. Back pain would not have resulted, they say, if the general health of the victim had been satisfactory.
A recent textbook, Clinical Treatment of Back and Neck Pain by Hans Kraus, professor at the New York University School of Medicine, puts the blame for back pain primarily on the way people live in modern “civilized” countries. In an interview he stated: “Our sedentary, over-stimulated society deprives us of physical activity while submitting us to constant stress.” In a study of over 5,000 patients with back pain it was found that in over 80 percent of the cases muscular deficiency and overtension “were at the root of their problems.”
The fact that people generally engage in ever less physical activity (using the family auto to go to the grocery store just a few blocks away, for example), while subjecting themselves to ever-increasing stimulation and tension, largely by pleasure-seeking and materialism, would therefore be a factor in the increase of back pain. And if these things are indeed at the root of the problem, it can readily be understood why some good-looking spines cause much pain and why some poor-looking spines do not. The general health of the individual rather than the way the spine looks would determine whether there is back pain or not.