Recovering from Back Pain, Naturally

Pretty much everyone, some time or other, will experience back pain. I do remember moving a large CRT TV from my house and hurting my back. It did eventually heal. I have known others with chronic back pain, some visiting a local pain clinic. They said their visits were near useless.

This back pain article is very interesting, going through MRI scans, surgery implications, opiods, and eventually conservative management. The Guardian article refers to a Lancet series of three back pain articles.

When I ask Underwood what works, he tells me: “Whatever you do for a patient at a time when their back is really bad, the chances are they’re going to be a lot better three weeks later. So we treat people and we see them getting better and we ascribe their improvement to the treatment we’ve given, but we know that natural improvement over time is always much larger than the positive effect you get from the treatment.”…

“The truth is that low back pain is a many-faceted problem, emerging from your life situation, the state of your body and the social factors surrounding you.” Rather than trying to find a doctor who can make the pain disappear, we need to be aware that to a certain degree, it is a part of life and the best approach is to keep physically active in the right way, to find a strategy to manage stress and to keep on with normal activities. Like all complicated pain, avoiding it, trying to use a substance to blot it out, investing in one person the belief that he or she can cure you: that all makes it worse.

Prevention and treatment of low back pain: evidence, challenges, and promising directions

The authors of the review in adults concluded that moderate quality evidence existed that exercise alone, or in combination with education, is effective for prevention; and poor to very-poor quality evidence existed that education alone, back belts, shoe insoles, and ergonomic programmes might not be effective.4 The preventive effect of exercise and education was large, with a pooled relative risk of 0·55 (95% CI 0·41–0·74)…

My general advice is to strengthen your core, which are the muscles surrounding your spine. These include your stomach muscles/rectus abdominus and side muscles/obliques, and back muscles such as your lats. They will keep your spine and supplemental muscles supported. Strengthen them with daily weight lifting and strengthening exercises. These exercises are not complex and do not need fancy equipment, but need a daily workout. The back and stomach muscles of the core do not bulk up easily, so endurance is required. This means a relatively high amount of reps with light weight.