Back Pain Prevention…One Intervention Stands Out!
By Randall C Pruitt, DC, DACNB, DAAPM, FACFN, MUAC, CES-NASM
Here at the Arizona Back Institute we see a lot of unfortunate souls who have really been put through the ringer when it comes to their back and neck pain treatments. If you don’t know already, my practice really deals mostly with this type of patient and very rarely do we see someone who just hurt their back yesterday. We see really chronic cases that have been going on for months to years. These patients not only have a lot of pain, but they also have very weak and atrophied spinal muscles which in and of itself promotes further damage.
Therefore, a big portion of my program centers on the use of very specific and progressive exercise to restore spinal function and stability. This is an integral part of the process and one that really cannot be skipped. Most people in our society unfortunately are not big on prevention and are de-conditioned to begin with. And we go about our daily lives not really thinking of preventing things like back pain because it doesn’t seem as important as things like cholesterol and heart disease and the other conditions that can potentially kill us. But trust me many of my patients would have done things a lot differently if they only knew.
With prevention in mind let’s take a look at a review on the primary prevention of back pain by Stanley Bigos MD professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Washington. He and his colleagues conducted a systematic review to see whether any primary prevention method found support in high quality clinic trials. And they concluded that medicine and industry may have overlooked an effective prevention strategy: exercise in both the workplace and community settings. In this review the researchers found strong and consistent evidence that exercise had a significant impact , both in terms of preventing symptoms, and reducing back pain-related work loss. They also noted that with the exception of exercise no other prevention method had strong scientific evidence to support it. Things like belts, shoe inserts even ergonomic training.
I always find it interesting that common sense things like using exercise to reduce back pain, need to be studied over and over again and proven with more and more studies. I am sure that you probably already knew you needed to exercise more and that you feel better overall when you do, not to mention your back doesn’t hurt as much or as often. But nonetheless as doctors we need to make sense of things and prove it once and for all before we can sit back and say with conviction that exercise reduces the prevalence of back pain.
Even treatments like spinal decompression make sense to people. When I go into detail with a patient about how the discs are injured or how they heal and explain the role of spinal decompression most people “get it”. It makes sense and in over 12 years of offering it and with over 10,000 people coming through my door, I am convinced it is THE best treatment for disc related back and neck pain, bar none. The problem is that by itself it can’t prevent a re-occurrence of back pain, that is where prevention comes into play and our type of prevention is utilizing MedX technology to strengthen the back and neck to a point where you are normal for your age and weight. Then it is up to you to exercise on your own to maintain good spinal health. Don’t worry we’ll give you the tools, but you have to use them.
I applaud the authors of the above study, because sometimes things need to be spelled out for us before we’ll really take them seriously.
