Put your back (and mind) into it
If you’ve never had a bad back, consider yourself lucky. However, chances are you’ll experience it to some degree in the future.
In the run up to BackCare Awareness Week (October 8-12), BackCare, the charity for healthier backs, points out that as many as four out of five UK adults, including celebrities like Victoria Beckham and the former Dr Who David Tennant, have back pain at some stage of their life.
It’s a huge problem, costing the NHS £1.3 million a day, and the UK economy £37 million a day, with around 1% of the working population off sick due to back pain every day.
BackCare stresses that ‘back pain doesn’t kill, it tortures’.
This won’t be the case for everybody, of course. For many people, the pain will only be mild or will improve or disappear quickly.
For others, though, back pain is a debilitating, chronic condition which can have a huge impact on quality of life.
However, physiotherapist Nick Sinfield is eager to point out that relief could be out there – providing people look after both their backs and their mindsets.
In his new book, Now I Can Bend My Back!, Sinfield insists that much back pain is Tension Related Pain (TRP).
“If people feel some back pain and it doesn’t subside and they aren’t given an answer to its cause, they may become worried, confused, and anxious about it.
“This in turn may cause more tightness in the soft tissues around the back and neck, especially as people concentrate on the pain, which is commonly TRP,” he explains.
“This soft tissue tightness to the muscles and connective tissue can cause lingering pain or chronic back pain.”
Sinfield says TRP will affect people differently, and the degree to which it makes up the overall level of pain somebody’s experiencing will vary from individual to individual.
But, he says, if sufferers acknowledge and deal with TRP, and look after their backs by doing regular stretches and core strength exercises, the torture of back pain can be avoided for many.
Most back pain is mechanical – connected to muscles and joints, rather than discs or nerves – says Sinfield, and he advises: “People need to get to know their bodies so they can self-manage their back pain.
“They need to learn about their back and manage the confusion and anxiety about it so that they’re in control.”
While TRP is very common, Sinfield acknowledges that, of course, it’s not the only cause of back pain. However, while injury and structural issues such as disc problems or a simple strained muscle can cause acute symptoms, in the vast majority of people this should settle in time.
According to BackCare, 90% of people with acute back pain will recover within six weeks.
But Sinfield believes that often after a medical diagnosis, people become stressed and frightened that they’ll hurt their back further.
“This accumulation of anxiety and stress causes the arrangement of your muscles, nerves, tendons and ligaments to tighten and change,” he explains, “and it’s these changes that cause your back pain to flare up and recur again and again.”
He claims that even structural abnormalities like herniated discs, low back and shoulder pain can be linked to TRP, and advises back pain sufferers to identify stress and tension in their lives, which might be anything from financial and work pressures to family conflict, and accept that the pain may be linked to the stress.
Accepting that the pain has an emotional root and changing behaviour and thought patterns, together with exercising to stimulate blood flow and oxygen to areas of pain, can help, he says.
Sinfield suggests a number of exercises, ranging from postural awareness tasks and breathing exercises, to a wide variety of stretches and low back and neck strengthening activities, all of which can be slotted into an existing programme, or perhaps done for 10-15 minutes every other day.
“Muscles can get imbalanced, some become tight and others become weak,” he explains.
“With core stability exercises you’re aiming to rebalance them.
“I think huge numbers of people, particularly in the construction industry, just put up with bad backs and soldier on. But if they do a few stretches and some core stability, self-manage their backs and change their mindset, they can avoid these problems.
“I want to change the way people look at the situation and give them more confidence to start exercising.”
Dr Adam Al-Kashi, BackCare’s head of research, agrees that tension and worrying can have a huge impact, and points out that BackCare-funded research into negative thinking and back pain found that people prone to worrying were less likely to recover.
“Acute pain is an important indicator of tissue damage,” he says, “but once the pain becomes chronic, while it feels identical it’s actually driven in a completely different way by the central nervous system, via the mind.”
Al-Kashi would like to see body strength exercises “become the new jogging” in the future, and advises people to try calisthenic exercise such as yoga or pilates.
BackCare says 30 million people will have back pain this year alone, and it wants BackCare Awareness Week to draw attention to their suffering.
The week is particularly focusing on builder’s back pain, as construction workers suffer 30,000 new back injuries every year. And the campaign isn’t just addressing professional building workers – the charity points out that 88% of men and 75% of women do DIY, which generates a further 80,000 new back injuries annually.
BackCare stresses that back pain is an important issue – whether or not you are actually affected by it yourself.
“The financial burden is enormous, and back pain is a leading cause of time off work,” stresses Al-Kashi.
“It’s so common, but a lot of the time people will have experienced back pain in a relatively minor form and they don’t appreciate that it can be very serious and can affect people’s whole lives.
“Many people are permanently disabled as a result of back pain. It doesn’t kill you. It does, however, destroy lives and livelihoods.”
BackCare Awareness Week runs from October 8-12
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