Chronic lower back pain linked to atrophy in pain-related brain regions
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
Funny enough, letting my six year old beat the crap out of me while wrestling with her has been some of the best PT I’ve had.
Something to the tune of: our back and torso muscles are responsible for keeping our spines (and all their structures) aligned in a healthy, mechanically-sound position. Things start to go wrong when the muscles are weak/atrophied/unbalanced, and no longer "hold" the vertebrae in their proper positions, which can lead to the disks bulging out and other mechanical issues that lead to low-intensity damage.
With this in mind, I started stretching my back, and focusing on getting into a "neutral," or healthy, posture on a day-to-day (to remove the muscle tightness caused by me unconsciously hunching, and exacerbating the problem -- after having a herniated disc). In theory, this remedies the muscles pulling my vertebrae in the "wrong" directions and intensities.
Coupled with weight training (squats, deadlifts, OHP, and bench), I believe I've managed to strengthen my back muscles, and "realigned" their efforts into the way my spine should be held up (instead of the way it was held up, due to sitting around all day).
It's gotten much better, and I don't have pain or unintended tightness anymore.
N.B. I've also relieved myself of knee pain, by focusing on the way my hips are "held" during walking. It seemed like mine were tilting too much forward (and not holding my body in place properly), so knee pain manifested (and perhaps was even the catalyst for my herniated disc). Once I straightened them out, I was able to walk pain-free.
I started weight training and stretching and my regular back pain is a thing of the past. My backs squat went from around body weight to 2x body weight. When ever a pain shows up anywhere for me (knee, shoulder, wrist, back, etc), it is because of a muscle pulling on it out of balance. I stretch the muscle, the opposing muscle, and related muscles. Generally if my back is sore these days it is because I need to stretch my hips. A few minutes of stretching and I'm good to go.
Still haven't gotten all the grip strength back in my foot though and that annoys the hell out of me.
My back pain is also less in the morning if I didn't eat anything the day before. From what I've read, autophagy doesn't really kick in until ~48 hours after starting a fast, but something's going on that reduces pain.
> Yet approximately 90% of patients with CLBP cannot identify any clear specific cause or origin of their pain.
Same here.
More than once in my life I seemed to not feel any pain unless my injury get to the point of damage preventing proper physical operations.
It feels like I was doing something wrong and didn't get feedback from my body until it was too late.
Learning from this article about correlation between lower back pain and with lower brain volumes in pain-related brain areas strikes home.
Too often people avoid DLs because 'they don't want to hurt their back', w/o realizing they are setting themselves to get hurt later. Years of DLs mean I instinctively pick up everything with good form. Meanwhile my friend hurt his back by awkwardly picking up his toothbrush that fell on the floor...
[1] I heard a measure once that for non-workout people, a good rule of thumb is to be able to easily and correctly KB squat and DL ~#45-#50 - the average weight of a toddler.
This type of therapy is not new, but it's only very recently that proper big and reputable studies have been done. Most people don't even need to see a professional, reading online and doing it on your own is enough for the majority (including me).
[1]: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/09/29/how-therapy-not-pi...
I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I'd say from my personal experience a physical yoga practice helps teach you to properly relax into what can sometimes be extreme discomfort. I remember when I first started practicing, whenever we'd get to long holds of poses (e.g. splits, pigeon, ustrasana), my body would start panicking and want me to come out of it immediately. But if you just keep bringing your awareness to the breath and meditate through the sensations that arise, the body starts relaxing and accepts where it's at.
I can imagine the PRT therapy probably includes some subset of the four foundations of mindfulness [1].
It has much in common with mindfulness I'd say, with some extra "simplified" techniques and learnings. It's easy to dismiss this type of therapy (even more so before there were studies on it), but the mindset changes which it advocates are very wholesome and are likely to increase quality of life even if it would fail to lessen the pain, so there's very little to lose!
Sarno's books and theories are a bit outdated at this point, but we now have people like Howard Schubiner and Nicole Sachs, and things like Curable.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34586357/ [2] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cure-for-chronic-p... [3] https://www.curablehealth.com
I'm currently in one of my bi-annual cycles and this one is particularly nasty. 800mg ibuprofen + 1500mg of acetaminophen + 10mg cyclobenzaprine every four hours was doing absolutely nothing for the symptoms. I ended up trying every other remedy under the sun including epsom salt baths, Tiger Balm, etc., for relief. What worked? CBD balm.
I don't believe in anything that can be attributed to the placebo effect and that's what I consider remedies like CBD balm. But, it worked and I am going to run w/it. I wish it were easier than me having to fork over $30 for snake oil to trick my body into a positive response but here we are.
Tangentially and more generally, it seems to completely ignore that the hard problem of consciousness is unsolved and the mainstream idea of causality pointing from material world to consciousness—X is wrong with your body, hence neurons fire, hence you feel pain—is essentially an unprovable conjecture.
When it somehow works, it is very good at creating an impression that we know what we are doing, but it strikes me at being more or less in shambles at some fundamental level.
I'm sure that the medicine of neurodegenerative diseases will receive more attention than almost any other field of medicine in the coming decades. Alzheimers, ALS and similar grave diseases are already major research priorities, but if chronic lower back pain and other chronic pain is definitely shown to frequently be the result of brain atrophy then better understanding (and hopefully treatments) may matter for a large part of the working population as well.
As an analogy, most cases of pneumonia are caused by streptococcus pneumococcus, and most of us have this bacteria in our lungs by the time we are 5 years old, and yet the bacteria lives in our lungs for most of our lives, and it does no damage, so long as our immune system is healthy. But then one day, when we are 85 years old, the streptococcus pneumococcus becomes active and hurts us. This is after 80 years of peaceful coexistence.
At one point I was looking up incidence of disease on the CDC website, and I was surprised to see that they said 1 out of 3 Americans test positive for exposure to neisseria meningitis, which can cause spinal meningitis. Only about 55 Americans a year die from this, so this is a bacteria which apparently reaches 100 million Americans but causes death in less than 0.000000001% cases. But maybe it can cause back pain? Maybe as we get older, and our immune system is less active, neisseria meningitis could cause inflammation in the spine?
I once had an illness that doctors thought was Lyme disease. Among other things, it gave me agonizing back pain, so bad that I would have to lie on the couch all day, unable to move. But antibiotics fully resolved the situation. So the fact that bacteria can cause back pain is well known to me, and the fact that antibiotics can solve back pain, in some cases, is also well known to me.