BACK PAIN MYTHS

Back pain is the most common reason people have for coming to see me in my clinic.  And it’s not just me; back pain takes up a huge amount of the time and resources of the healthcare system as a whole.  More people take time off work because of back pain than for any other reason and it is also the single most frequent cause of visits to GPs.  It’s no exaggeration to say that there is a back pain epidemic in Australia.

You’d think for something so common, we’d have a pretty good understanding of back pain but the fact is we don’t, not the general public and not always clinicians. So I’m going to list a series of back pain myths and misconceptions over the next several weeks^*

So back pain myth number one is that it is something exceptional that you should be very worried about if it happens to you.  As we have already seen, this is just not the case; back pain is nearly universal.  Just about everyone will experience it at one time or another.  As one commentator puts it “(back pain)… is just the price we pay for being such high functioning organisms”.  We ask a lot of our bodies and sometimes our bodies will complain.

The good news is nearly everyone recovers from an episode of acute lower back pain. The prognosis if you have back pain is really very good. Within two weeks you are likely to be much better and by three months fully restored even without treatment of any sort.  

Only a very small number of people will develop long term disabling problems associated with back pain.  If you are unfortunate enough to be one of them, be assured that there is much that can be done to help you.  And as we will see in subsequent articles in this series, a lot of what helps is contrary to popular beliefs.

*Most of this material is drawn from an excellent article by Mary O’Keeffe, Kieran O’Sullivan and Derek Griffin.