The Challenge of Back Pain

In our body, no area presents more of a challenge to doctors than the back.

Second only to that of head pain, debilitating low back pain strikes 80 per cent of us during our lifetimes; it causes millions of lost work days and accounts for a steady stream of patients to general practitioners.

In spite of endless research into its diagnosis, causes and treatment, medical practitioners seem no nearer to understanding back pain. The facts are that misdiagnosis or unproven and aggressive treatment with drugs and surgery contributes more to the problems of back pain sufferers than they do to the solutions.

Conventional methods of diagnosis are still very ineffective. For instance, routine x-rays to determine whether low back pain is caused by a serious condition are virtually useless. By treating back pain as a disease rather than a symptom, we have gone down many one way streets of diagnosis and treatment, with many patients only suffering increased pain from inappropriate treatment.

Some doctors have suggested that conventional medicine should increase its understanding of the back and its problems by adopting an osteopathic / chiropractic understanding of back pain.

The back then becomes part of a whole, complex structure that includes the spine, ribs, pelvis, hips and their surrounding muscles and ligaments and other supporting tissues, as well as the organs contained within those bony structures. Dysfunction or displacement of any of these parts of the structure can eventually lead to back pain.

The vast majority of medical practitioners need to be able to both evaluate and assess the whole impact of the back pain on an individual whilst the individual needs to be able to understand their back pain so that they can work more effectively with their chosen health practitioner.