Back Pain in Context

You are not alone
Excruciating back pain is so seemingly unique and awesome an experience that the suffering individual often assumes that they are the subject of a rare event or perhaps one of the few persons to ever sustain such a degree of agony. After all, if it were a common phenomenon, surely someone they know would have told them about it. The reality is that few people actually discuss it because, in so doing, it exposes a frailty or imperfection in themselves.

The Pain
Few people who do not have "bad backs" can appreciate the excruciating torture that constitutes back pain, the inconvenient agony of lying on the floor in a fetal position knowing that any movement produces a sensation equivalent to a sharp wedge being driven into the spine, the exponential number of lifestyle restrictions it produces, and the depression accompanying the realization that your mind has youthful desires yet your body's actions are confined by limitations ordinarily reserved for the elderly.

Contemporary Perspective on Back Pain
At this juncture, I suspect I am "preaching to the choir" because if you have accessed this information, it is most likely due to a personal experience with back pain or knowing someone close to you who can't be faking that much discomfort so convincingly and consistently.

Historical Perspective of Back Pain
In some respects, using non-surgical, physically manipulative, means to mechanically alter the spine may be retrospectively looked upon, in part, as a long-lost art probably practiced by Medieval Arab physicians.

Science and Art
This medthodology is based upon the premise that there is nothing meta-physically mysterious about back pain. It is not only the result of fate but of function as well. By and large, once the mystery is revealed, the "secret" becomes common place and like all mysterious entities, it then becomes less frightening and manageable.

Alternative Therapeutic Modalities
There are certainly other back pain therapies available; and I would invite the reader to try them. They are usually divided into conservative and surgical modalities. For an overview of the available modalities, I again refer the reader to the above referenced AHCPR literature or any practitioner.

Back Surgery
If the reader is considering the alternative surgical option and turns himself over to a surgeon for a solution, I must first reveal a sobering statistic. In a study by Weber(25), 280 patients were evaluated over a ten year period. At the end of one year, 90% of surgical patients reported a satisfactory outcome compared with only 60% of the conservatively treated group. However, 25% of the conservatively treated group over the ten year period resorted to surgery.

Comparative Programs
Although there are several back pain books on the market and numerous physical therapy programs, The O'Connor Technique (tm) is not just another back pain methodology filled with various exercises that no one can realistically be expected to do when in the throes of a back pain episode or for that matter maintained daily for the rest of one's life.

Not an Excercise Program
In fact, The O'Connor Technique (tm) is not predominately an exercise program at all. Although the value of proper exercise to keep the back musculature in good tone cannot be underestimated as a preventative measure, it is not necessary to exercise pain away. Pain is alleviated by a few simple movements called "MANEUVERS."

Dismissing the "Psychological" Contribution To Spinal Pain
Another fallacy (which is currently being touted in the back pain treatment circles usually accompanying the mischaracterization of a person in legitimate pain as being poorly motivated) is that when people don't get better in keeping with the averages, they have a good probability of having a psychological component to their back pain which is interfering with the therapeutic process. This causes me to advise: When your doctor drags out a psychologist or psychiatrist to participate in the management of your back pain yet you know you are in real pain and that it is the pain itself causing the depression, anxiety, or hopelessness, it is time to re-evaluate the successfulness of your current therapeutic regimen and the wisdom of your physician or his HMO.

Getting Better as a Process
MAKING YOUR BAD BACK BETTER is, among other things, an ongoing continual process of altering your activities of daily living in a non-inconveniencing manner. Take heart, though, any inconvenience can be seen to be vastly overshadowed by the benefit.

Become your own Chiropractor
Chiropractors for years have explained their technique as one in which the manipulator "adjusts" the spine. The theory (as explained to me on numerous occasions when the nearly identical "spiel" is repeated in offices, at street fairs, etc.) holds to a belief that the spinal vertebrae can go out of "alignment."

Hope
At times, it may seem to the back pain sufferer that there is little or no hope for ever being "normal" again. Some readers may say to themselves, "If I have to go through all this every day of my life, I might just as well have the whole thing fused surgically and live with a stiff low back."