Back Troubles and the Failure of “Modern” Medicine

In Which Our Hero Succumbs to 1970s Era Furniture

Eleven years ago this June I tweaked the hell out of my back. This happened while foolishly trying to move a couch (a hide-a-bed made from cast iron and lead it seemed) with my brother. One instant I was carrying the damn thing up the ramp of the moving truck, the next I was on the ground unable to get up. I made an agonizing crawl from the driveway to the Living Room inside the house and then lay sprawled out totally incapacitated. I was taken to the hospital via ambulance where I lay strapped to a board on a gurney for 3 hours before a doctor finally decided to come see me. After various excruciatingly painful tests it was determined that the damage was all muscular and I was given some drugs and sent on my way. After about a week or so I was on the mend and back to normal mobility and low levels of pain.

10 Years of On Again Off Again Pain

Over the past 11 years I have had a re occurrence of my lower back pain, on average, every 18 months. In the Fall of 2005 I injured it worse than usual removing leaves from my yard (leaves the curse of a beautiful wooded lot). It got so bad that I finally decided to go to the doctor. The doctor did some basic motion tests and got my background story; her conclusion was a herniated disc. Great. She prescribed Physical Therapy. My brother had just finished physical therapy for his back, a thoracic problem rather than lumbar like mine, and spoke highly of the process and its results. This and the horrible life-changing daily pain convinced me to follow through with the therapy.

Physical Therapy Should Help, Right?

At my first physical therapy appointment I was asked a good number of questions about my problem, how it manifests, etc… I was also given some more range of motion tests. The real kicker is that by the time my appointment rolled around my pain had subsided a great deal and when I was asked if certain things caused pain or not I had a hard time answering due, I think, to my newly acquired higher pain tolerance. Over the course of 4 weeks, with sessions two times per week, I was shown various exercises and stretches as well as given ultrasound treatment and put through the ringer on various exercise machines. At the end of all of this I felt about the same as I did at the beginning. At my last appointment I asked for a regime that I could follow to continue helping my back as well as anything I could do during any acute flare-ups that might occur. Feeling somewhat satisfied that I had done the right thing I moved on.

Modern Medical Arts Fail our Protagonist

Over the course of the 15 months since the doctor’s visit and subsequent physical therapy my back has been on average much worse! I was pretty diligent about my stretches and exercises for the months immediately following the therapy. I then had a tapering off to nothing over the months following that. I did however increase my daily activity levels, make efforts to sit for shorter periods of time, and lose weight. At this point in the story I decided that another trip to the doctor was going to be useless and I was going to have to take things into my own hands.

The Best Doctor is the one that Cares the Most, You!

I performed a good deal of Internet research weeding out the quack theories, the unproven, the money making schemes, etc… One name kept popping up, Stuart McGill. He is a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Ontario Canada. His approach to helping with lower back troubles was to not take the clinical “best-practices” for granted but instead to apply a rigorous scientific and engineering approach to the problem. McGill’s, and others, research is showing that what modern medicine thinks is right for problematic backs is in many cases not at all true. In fact many of the prescribed stretches and exercises are likely exacerbating the problems. One particular exercise that I has told to do while doing physical therapy (pushing back on a bar against your back so as to flex the spine backwards against some level of resistance) is the number one technique that McGill and his colleagues use to produce herniated discs in test spines!

Towards a Solution. Thanks to the Scientific Method and Engineering

I am currently reading McGill’s book, Lower Back Disorders. It is a text that is clearly aimed at the clinical and rehabilitative audience, yet it is also clear from my experience that the clinical and rehabilitative audiences are not reading up on this type of research! I am only about a third of the way into but I have already learned so much. I do not want to try and address my problems until I have digested all of the material that is in the book, but once I do so I will hopefully be on the road to a healthy back and a life in which I can sit on the floor to play with my son and not be in agony.

I will continue to post on this topic as thing progress, good or bad. I am beginning to feel that there are legions of folks out there that are suffering through back pain and are frustrated with the general incompetence of the medical arts community as well as the general uncaring that is pervasive in modern American medicine. (I can not speak to any other countries medical establishments.) One last note, earlier in this post I mentioned that my brother had injured his back somewhere in the thoracic area and that he received physical therapy for it. Based on my readings and understanding of his condition I thing that he received an incorrect diagnosis. Jason, it was likely an end plate fracture somewhere in your thoracic spine. But what do I know?

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