Is the Healthcare system making your back pain worse?
““My Doctor said I have the worst back they’ve ever seen””
First off...why the hell would you ever turn something so fear-provoking, such as low back pain, into something debilitating! Secondly...I heard the same thing from a different patient yesterday....coming from the same practitioner....who was probably embellishing to one or both of you. Unfortunately, a day doesn't pass a client reminds us "how bad of a back" they have. Even more unfortunate, is they hear these thought viruses from a (hopefully) well-intentioned practitioner who didn't think about what they were saying before they said it.
Low back pain is normal and doesn't need to be disabling. Everyone reading this (myself included) has had or will have low back pain at some point in their life. Luckily, it's estimated only 0.9% of all low back pain is from something actually serious! Serious things such as cancer or fracture. It's also estimated, radicular symptoms (fancy name for nerve pain or leg pain (think "sciatica")) is only 3-5% of low back pain!!!! Science matters...and science says the likelihood your back pain is a "serious" condition is less than 1% and you having "sciatica" is less than 5%.
Why then do so many people have these beliefs about their "bad back" when low back pain is so common and "serious" conditions causing low back pain are so uncommon? I believe it's due to two things: 1. reliance on X-ray's and MRI's to make a diagnosis and 2. the idea if something hurts there is damage somewhere.
We know if you shoot an X-ray or MRI of someone's back who doesn't have low back pain you have an 87% (!!!!!) chance of finding degenerative disc disease, arthritis, or disc herniations. You probably have a similar likelihood of having those same findings when your back hurts. If you didn't fall, don't have a history of cancer, or don't have numbness/tingling in a particular pattern (something your healthcare provider should know)...then having an X-ray or MRI probably isn't very useful. Now you just have an expensive picture of your back and increased fear about something you probably already had, and you still have back pain!!!
The idea something hurting equals something being wrong is a rabbit hole I won't dive into right now (I probably will soon though). As healthcare practitioners, we are taught in graduate school, or medical school, you did A and it's causing B. If it were so black and white, we wouldn't need to go to school for so long to make an educated decision. Think about this...if you stub your toe on the leg of a table it's probably going to hurt but you aren't going to think about it for the next 35 years and tell everyone you have a "bad toe"! So why do we think this way when we "tweak" our back?
If you're back is sore, just remember...less than 1% of the time it's serious and you don't need the expensive picture . Our backs are made to withstand a ton of use and are not fragile at all! Become resilient in both your mental and muscular structure and don't let these thought viruses impede your life.