Your 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 ego rarely allows this revealing a disclosure.

Surprisingly enough, recurring back pain is the most common complaint among adults approaching their physicians. It is second only to the common cold as a reason for office visits to primary care physicians. Low back problems affect virtually everyone at some time during their life. Surveys indicate that in any given year, 50% of working-age adults have back pain symptoms, but only 15-20% seek medical care. In one recent study, 41% of enrollees in a group health plan reported having back pain within the last six months. By the age of 70, 85% of the population will have had an episode of back pain. At any given moment, 15% to 20% of the adult population have low back pain. Back pain is the leading cause of disability in persons younger than 45 years, and the third leading cause among those older than 45. A number of studies have indicated that 40% of all adults will experience sciatica (back pain with radiation down the leg) some time during their life. In the U.S., 13.7% of all persons have back pain lasting more than two weeks. Lastly, back problems are the second most common reason for non-surgical hospital admissions among adults under age 65.

If money spent on a problem gives some measure of its extent in our society, the staggering costs and lost productivity are sufficient to convince the back pain sufferer that they are, indeed, a part of something big. The annual costs of disability and treatment of back pain increased from $14 Billion in 1976 to $30 Billion in 1986. By 1989, just the medical costs of back pain alone generated $14 Billion per year in the United States. The latest and most recent quote for the yearly costs related to back pain comes from the authors of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research's publication. They estimate it costs the health system upwards of $20 BILLION PER YEAR. In the U.S., back pain is responsible for an average of 12% of all sick leave, rivaling the common cold as a leading cause of absenteeism from work.

Back pain results in the loss of more than 93 million work days each year. It has been estimated that the yearly medical costs for treatment of just Lumbar disc disease is nearly $5 Billion., In the automobile industry, as much as 5% of a car's price pays for back injury claims, and among postal employees, 1 in every 25 cents of postage pays for back problems. Tragically, back pain disables as many as 4 million persons in the United States per year.

Misery may love company, but delineating the magnitude of the problem offers small consolation for the individual back pain sufferer in the throes of agony. However, as Karma would have it, if spinal pain were not such a ubiquitous, inadequately addressed, problem in our society, this book probably would never have reached your hands. You are holding this book precisely because The O=Connor Technique (tm) and the principles elaborated herein promise to favorably and dramatically alter the above statistics.

There is every reason to believe that, if put into wide-spread practice, The O=Connor Technique (tm) has the potential to revolutionize the manner in which back pain is treated. By arriving at both a novel understanding of spinal mechanics and the development of a mechanism to physically alter them, most back pain can be successfully managed earlier and better than ever before. Prior to the onset of irrevocable damage, the deleterious consequences of neglecting spinal mechanical principles can be prevented, human movements can be directed to rectify anatomical discrepancies, and the environment can be altered to accommodate spinal anatomy rather than the inverse. Even though the evidence is not available to fully support this claim, I personally believe that practicing The O=Connor Technique (tm) regularly throughout the ageing process can prevent the crippling effects of kyphosis (the bent-forward posture of old age). Finally, by applying the knowledge presented in this book, its readers can expect to extract themselves from otherwise contributing to the horrific aforementioned back suffering statistics

Article Contents:
You are not alone
The Pain
Contemporary Perspective on Back Pain
Historical Perspective of Back Pain
Science and Art
Alternative Therapeutic Modalities
Back Surgery
Comparative Programs
Not an Excercise Program
Dismissing the "Psychological" Contribution To Spinal Pain
Getting Better as a Process
Become your own Chiropractor
Hope

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