Category Archives: Back Pain

Rise in back pain and long-term sickness linked to home working – ONS

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Sharp rise in people leaving labour market in past three years could be related to home working since Covid

Back and neck injuries caused by working from home during the Covid pandemic has been identified by the UK’s official number crunchers as a possible factor contributing to a sharp rise in people leaving the labour market over the past three years.

The Office for National Statistics said there had been a marked increase in disabilities often associated by medical experts with excessive screen use, after the increase in the number of people home working while offices were shut during the pandemic.

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How to move: with chronic back pain

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Exercise is critical for the millions of people who live with chronic back pain. But how can you do it safely and effectively?

Back pain is the most common form of chronic pain, with about 4 million people living with it in Australia. The most effective way to manage chronic back pain is with a multidisciplinary approach, of which exercise is a key component.

“Any single treatment in low back pain is never enough by itself,” says Associate Prof Michael Vagg, a pain medicine physician and dean of the faculty of pain medicine at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. “But exercise is a fundamental part of recovering from low back pain and managing it if it becomes persistent.”

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Sufferers of chronic pain have long been told it’s all in their head. We now know that’s wrong

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In the first of a series looking at chronic pain and long Covid, Linda Geddes explores the growing realisation that pain can be a disease in and of itself – and the pandemic could be making it worse

It started with headaches and neck pain, but no sooner had Tricia Kalinowski’s physiotherapist come up with a strategy to tackle these problems, then another area of her body would start to hurt: her lower back, her hip or her jaw.

“The physio was chasing the pain up and down my body,” says Kalinowski, 60, from Minneapolis, US. Eventually, she was referred to an oral surgeon, who believed the root cause of these issues was a problem with one of the joints in her jaw, so she underwent surgery to replace a thumbnail-sized disc.

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‘Don’t freak out!’ Why keeping calm and carrying on exercising can help back pain

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When it hurts to walk, bend or even sit, it’s tempting to lie down until your spine sorts itself out. But moving can be the key to getting better

Turns out pandemics can be atrocious for our backs. By last October, more than a third of people in the UK had reported increased back pain, according to one study – and that was before an intense winter lockdown, followed by a month-long storm. We’ve been doing online yoga without an instructor’s watchful eye and lunging with Joe Wicks without warming up, but mostly slouching over laptops feeling tense or depressed.

While the onset of back, shoulder or neck pain can feel like the last straw, the good news is that it probably isn’t as bad as you think. “It’s not likely to be serious,” says Chris Mercer, an NHS consultant physiotherapist in Sussex who specialises in back pain. It was not uncommon to keep an old door under the bed, upon which to lie when your back “went”. But the latest evidence indicates that being active is essential for both avoidance and recovery. “Keep moving, keep active and things will settle,” he says.

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Daniel Andrews walking 18 minutes a day as he recovers from serious back injury

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Victorian premier says he’s making ‘steady progress’ after a ‘pretty painful’ few weeks

Daniel Andrews says he’s making steady progress in his recovery from a serious back injury and is now walking about 18 minutes a day.

Victoria’s premier suffered broken ribs and a fractured T7 vertebra after slipping on wet stairs at a holiday home on the Mornington Peninsula on 9 March.

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‘It’s all about the cracking noise’: the unlikely cult of the online chiropractor

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Back pain has become rife in lockdown. But that’s not the only reason chiropractors are being hailed as YouTube influencers – there’s a horror movie thrill, too

The man in a waistcoat and jeans stands over a woman who lies face-down on a vinyl bed. He is all hairy arms, and she a mop of dip-dyed hair. He presses one palm on her back; with the other he cups the side of her head and sharply thrusts. Click, crack: her neck twists in a way that necks don’t usually like to be twisted. The woman curses in apparent relief; the man laughs. He is Joseph Cipriano, a chiropractor who is also known as Dr Joe Back Crack or the Y Strap Doc (after his trademark treatment tool) and this video of him adjusting a client with “*EXTREMELY LOUD* chiropractic cracking” has been viewed 19m times.

Cipriano, who has 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube and his own range of “Team Y Strap” and “Make Your Spine Great Again” sweatshirts, is one of what his fellow chiropractors, Doc Manasseh, calls “a new wave of chiropractors globally to have gone viral”. In an age of back pain, chiropractors are the new social media influencers. But why do so many people want to watch them? And is the rise about more than a interest in good spine health?

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‘Pilates-changed-my-life’ stories are annoying… but it did

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Over three years the exercise regime took Rachel Cooke from terrible back pain to new levels of fitness. But it was a lot harder than she expected

One morning almost five years ago, I awoke from uneasy dreams and, like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis, found myself to be… well, not precisely an insect, but the effect was similar. Trying to get out of bed, I realised I could barely move. So excruciating was the pain in my back, my only option seemed to be to roll myself – thunk! – on to the floor.

Lying there on my stomach for a few moments, I took in the view (beneath the bed were old shoes and dust balls the size of planets) and then, screwing up my courage, I crawled on to the landing – which is where I stayed for the rest of the day, sobbing quietly and wondering how I would get to the loo; when, exactly, the NHS emergency doctor would arrive.

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Female veterans experience improvement in low back pain with course of chiropractic care

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A new study finds that female veterans - one of the fastest growing populations receiving treatment through the Veterans Administration health care system - experience improvement in low back pain with a course of chiropractic care, according to the American Chiropractic Association . Published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, the study's authors note that musculoskeletal conditions such as back pain are the most common ailments among female veterans.