For anyone starting a repair and strengthening program for their back pain, I offer the same advice – be gentle with them, listen to your body and don’t overdo it.

Correct goal setting and a weekly timetable will help you to stay on track with such a demanding and busy life.

There are 2 stages of your recovery to focus on.

1. to repair the back, and

2. to strengthen the back.

The exercises in my book will help with both these stages, but for people with more challenging conditions it can help a lot to include some therapists in your treatment plan.

Massage can help to reduce some tension in your back and promote blood flow which will promote healing. The only thing is, there is a huge difference in quality between different massage therapists and as such you may have to try several before finding a good one (there are some tips at the back of my book to help with this). For example a good therapist will often allow 90 minutes for the first consultation in order to get to know you and understand your condition.

For part 2 to strengthen the back the key is to find something that will be gentle yet effective in improving posture and strength so as not to aggravate your pain any more.

There are a lot more resources in the Back Pain Can Be Fixed Self Help System (scroll 2/3 of the way down this page to see all the components of the self help system) to help with all stages of this.

Dan

Regarding weight loss, diets often work in the short term, but it is not surprising that people struggle to keep the weight off. This is due to a few reasons. One of these is that during your dieting you would have had to have used your willpower to eat in a different manner to the way you had for the last 20 years. After you have finished the diet your 20-year-old eating habits did not take long to take control again. This is especially the case when you have stress and fatigue in your life and use food as a “pick me up” or emotional pain relief.

There are few “tricks” you can use to change your habits for the long term.
The first of these is to remove any sweet and sugary snacks and food from your house to completely remove the temptation. That way when you get the urge to eat something sugary, it won’t be in easy reach in the house. The urge will often pass if the snacks are not close at hand. This will of course involve enlisting your family’s support to help you with this as they will also not have sweets to eat in the house!
The second is to eat more healthy snacks. I would suggest buying lots of fruit for this. You can snack on fruit as often as you want, even before you get hungry, and this will prevent the urge to eat something sweet. The natural sugar in the fruit will give you an energy boost. The more healthy food you eat in general the less room there will be in your stomach and the less cravings you have for sugary sweets. My partner is an experienced dietitian/nutritionist and I learnt these tricks from her as she has had great success with them with her clients.

These suggestions will help – but be kind to yourself – change can be slow initially.

Technorati Tags: back pain, chronic back pain, diet, habits, weight loss

Back pain is extremely challenging and no one can truly understand your own unique situation and pain and this is why the best way to overcome it is to educate yourself as much as possible to direct your own treatment.

Back pain for fit and active people that become inactive is common as muscle imbalances easily develop during this change. Also back pain during and after pregnancy is common as it puts enormous stresses on your body, not to mention if you had any poor postural habits or muscle weaknesses/imbalances to start with as the effect of these will be greatly exaggerated.

For those in a challenging situation – overcoming back pain will take time and require a well thought out approach.

Many people have done the ’rounds’ of all the different sorts of therapists and spent lots of money as I did. I had short term relief with a chiropractor, but it did not last. This is one other type of therapist that you may not have tried yet that I have had great, long term results with. To find someone who can help you in your local area go to: http://www.alexandertechnique.com/teacher/

Technorati Tags: back ache, back muscle, back pain, back pain treatment, lower pack pain

A recent question from a reader of my blog “I have been told I have degenerative disk disease, and that L4 and L5 are collapsed and need to be fused together. Can this be cured for real without surgery and can I become pain free?”

Now there are a lot of medical studies both recent and old that have some interesting findings in relation to this question.

This is a quote from the first which as I understand it says that back pain and degenerative discs are not related as once believed:
“The origin of chronic back pain is often assumed to be degenerative conditions of the spine; however, controlled studies have indicated that any correlation between clinical symptoms and radiological signs of degeneration is minimal or nonexistent”.
You can find this study here: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1144130-overview

A second study says that protruded disc tissue can be reabsorbed, “The rationale for non-operative treatment of discal herniation has been supported by clinical and autopsy studies which demonstrate that absorption of protruded and extruded disk material can occur over time.”
That study was published way back in 1950 (Source: Lindblom K, Hultqvist G. Absorption of protruded disc tissue. J Bone Joint Surg. 1950; 32A:557-560.)

From the first study another interesting quote, “Randomized trials of lumbar fusion compared with various non-operative strategies have shown neither consistently good outcomes with surgery nor clear benefit over nonsurgical treatments”.

To be clear I cannot answer the reader’s question, but the studies above are some food for thought. In my case (I never got an x-ray or an MRI because I was afraid of what it would find) when my back pain was at its worst I was determined to avoid surgery so I tried many natural treatments until I found the ones that helped me the most. In my opinion all the alternative and natural treatments I tried were a cheap and easy approach to try before expensive, risky and life-changing surgery.

What are other reader’s thoughts on this matter?

Technorati Tags: back pain, back surgery, chronic back pain, degenerative disc disease, disc herniations

There is a treatment for back pain that has been used for over 100 years to successfully treat Chronic Back Pain. It was proven in 2008 in a large scale medical study to be one of the best (if not THE best) long term back pain treatments. This is an important distinction as many treatments for back pain are successful in the short term – however proven successful LONG term treatments are rare.

What is this treatment? It’s not Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Physical Therapy (Physiotherapy), Muscle Strengthening Programs or Massage. In fact most people have never heard of this treatment.

There are a few reasons this treatment is not more widely known. Firstly it takes longer than other treatments to get results – 6 to 24 sessions, in fact. This can seem expensive. In fact in the trial mentioned above, for the first 3 months massage was just as an effective treatment. However over a 12 month period, this treatment shines.

The treatments are also called lessons, and require people to take responsibility for their own treatment as the process is an educational one. Does it sound like a lot of work? It can seem that way initially but the results are extremely rewarding for back pain sufferers. And cost effective in the long run. In the study above, an economic assessment recommended it be included in the national health scheme as it would save money.

In my own case my first experience in the technique was in a book. And one of the exercises recommended in that book released my lower back from a painful chronic spasm in such a way I felt instant relief. That exercise is called the semi-supine – and it is exercise #10 in my treatment system for back pain sufferers, Back Pain Can Be Fixed.

And the technique? It’s called the Alexander Technique. And it changed my life forever, saving me from the doom of neverending back pain, so that now I live a normal pain-free life.

In my last post I described how I went into chronic and very painful upper back pain, induced by pulling my shoulders back to hold good ‘posture’. It was at this point I realized that if something I did made my back pain worse, then maybe the cause of my back pain was not a mystery at all.

Maybe my back pain was my own entire fault I thought. Maybe it was due to the way I held my body in what I thought was correct posture – but in fact maybe the way I used my body was bad for it.

When I held my shoulders back to hold good posture the muscles between my shoulder blades were not meant to be activated for 24 hrs a day. After a while of holding them, it became a habit for them to be contracted. However the side effect of this continuous contraction was for the muscle to become extremely fatigued, but also very tight. My upper back muscles were locked in one position and causing pain which was the body’s way of telling me there was something wrong.

So maybe my upper back pain was caused by me incorrectly using the muscles between the shoulder blades as a matter of habit.

What if the same thing was happening with my chronic lower back pain? What if I was incorrectly using the muscles in my lower back as a matter of habit and this was causing my pain?

This would explain why I could go get a massage or chiropractic treatment and the pain would go away for a short time but never permanently. The pain always returned because I continued to overuse the muscles in a habitual way.

Convinced my theory had merit, I tried to stop using my lower back muscles. I failed miserably. Thankfully at this time in my back pain research & investigations online I came across a 100 year old technique that explained some missing pieces of the puzzle…

Technorati Tags: back pain, back pain treatment, back problems, chronic back pain, lower back pain

After having no long term relief or success with structural manipulation of my spine, I briefly went into a period of feeling helpless with my back pain. I lost hope and thought there was nothing I could do.

I then decided to try visiting a physiotherapist after a minor fall from a motorbike sent my back into even more pain than normal. After a brief massage I was given some stretches and exercises to do. Most of these aggravated the pain. He also told me I had bad posture and that I should “pull my shoulders back and stand up straight”.

So I did what I was told and walked around standing up as straight and tall as I could, pulling my shoulders back. After a week of this I had so much chronic pain between my shoulder blades I was struggling to sleep. My upper back muscles could not hold this unnaturally straight position of what I was told was good posture.

It was at this point I really started to get desperate. I thought that every therapist I went to seemed to make it worse. It was at this point my life changed forever though, and I discovered the technique that I now train in and want to share with others as much as possible.

In only 5 sessions over one week with this therapist I went from chronic pain to a relaxed feeling of no pain and ease.

I persisted with massage for months, which used to help most of the time. However at one stage my back seemed to spasm and lock into a painful position.  I then decided to try a visit to a chiropractor as that was what my father had always done for his back pain. 

I found my visits to the chiropractor normally got me fast relief. My back was cracked back into position seemingly quickly and easily.

The relief I experienced was normally short lived though.  Often the same day my back would start to cause pain, so I would be back to my chiropractor a week later.

I remember after a few weeks of this I started to question him about what I could do to prevent my back from ‘popping out’ in the first place. 

My question was almost pleading “why does this happen to me??” 

I will always remember his answer:  “I don’t know what causes it. No one does. You are a tall man in a short world and you’ll just have to live with the pain.”

 I remember thinking basically what a rubbish answer this was.  I placed my trust in the medical profession in the hope that after many years of medical college they would know far more about back pain and what caused it than I ever could.  I felt disappointed by both his lack of knowledge and lack of desire to find out. 

In my work as a senior reliability engineer at the time I was in charge of getting the best performance out of our manufacturing plant with a minimum amount of downtime.  Every time a piece of equipment broke down it brought the whole plant to a grinding halt and cost the company $70,000 per hour in lost downtime (that’s over $1,000 each minute!). 

For each breakdown the maintenance department was required to fix it ASAP, but my department – the reliability section – was required to urgently investigate what had caused the breakdown to ensure it would not happen again. 

The manager always expected me to find out and explain to him the exact root cause of the breakdown and what steps we were putting in place to ensure it would not happen again.  

But I remember thinking what the chiropractor had said to me – “I don’t know what causes it..you’ll just have to live with it”.

 If I had said this to my manager when a piece of equipment had broken down I would have been sacked! 

It was my job to find the root cause of any breakdown.  I couldn’t understand why health professionals were unable to do their job of helping me to find the root cause of my back pain so I would never have that pain again and therefore never have to come back to see him! Instead all I was getting was a ‘quick fix’ that was treating the symptom in a short term fix once per week.  This left me feeling extremely frustrated…

Technorati Tags: back pain, back pain treatments

I remember first experiencing back pain at university when I played football.  Often I would end up sore in certain muscles after a game, but occasionally the sore spot would be in my lower back.  It never stayed around for long enough to cause me any concern though until I graduated and started sitting down for long hours in front of a computer for my job.

At work I would sit for 8hrs+ per day, often slumping with terrible posture and then go out and play sport on weekends and after work.  When my back ended up sore after this, the way I looked after it when the weekend ended was to sit it in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.

Even though it became sore more often and stayed around for a bit longer each time it still never worried me.  I went to get medical treatment from a physiotherapist if I sprained my ankle, but never sought treatment for my back as I didn’t believe it was something that would ‘break’ or need treatment.

I can’t actually remember when or what caused it to start getting really bad.  I remember my back being so tight all the time, such that every time I received a knock in football (which in Australian Rules Football is very often) my whole body would jar and cause pain.  I then started going to a massage therapist most weeks I played football just in order to get myself fit enough to play football again.

It was at this point the back pain was starting to really frustrate me.  I think it was because I couldn’t understand where it was coming from or how to fix it.  And why was it happening to me?  I was only young, probably still in my early twenties then.  At that point I started to do a lot of stretching in the belief that if my muscles were tight they needed to be stretched.  I spent I lot of time at home, at work and at footy training stretching.  I also tried having hot baths to loosen my muscles and reduce the pain.

Where did your back pain begin? Leave a comment to share

Hi this is my blog about my own story of overcoming back pain. About how 18 months ago chronic lower back pain was running my life and people were telling me I would “have to live with it”. Everything I read seemed to indicate there was no treatment to fix back pain for good.

However after briefly losing hope I dug myself out of despair and decided to take charge of my own treatment. This led me to trying every sort of therapist and treatment under the sun.
I sought treatment from Doctors, Specialists, Chiropractors, Physiotherapists, Massage Therapists, Body workers, Stretch Therapists, Personal Trainers. Some helped…many didn’t.

I spent thousands of dollars on back pain gadgets and my own education. The gadgets didn’t help but the education did. I know now a lot more than I did about back pain and how it occurs and this was a critical factor in overcoming my own pain.

I feel frustrated though when I see the large amount of what I believe is incorrect, unhelpful back pain advice out there, especially online. Some of this advice I tried in the early stages when I had back pain, and it made the problem worse. I believe correct education and dispelling some of the popular back pain myths can help people with their pain – as it did me. At the very least if I can save at least some people from the pain I went through – then this website will have done its job.