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The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

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Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#271

Post by Nav_Panel »

visarga wrote: post #256

For 10 years I had a chronic back pain. It was like burning behind my shoulder blades. I went to doctors, did exercises and massage. No effect. Then I happened to take a Calcium supplement. Pain went away in 30 minutes. Now I am pain-free. Why couldn't the doctors detect my lack of Calcium and recommend a basic supplement in so many years? I think there is a lot of bullshit in how they deal with this kind of issues.…

> So maybe it was all because of the water I was drinking - too filtered, lacking normal minerals that are found in natural water.

Water is an interesting piece of our diets and lives. One thing I've noticed is that people seem to love ice-cold, filtered water (even in NYC, where we have exceptionally good tap water, my roommate bought a water filter and keeps it in the refrigerator). I personally like the idea of cold water but I realized I can't stand drinking it -- I'd rather have cool/room temperature tap water 9 times out of 10 times. People always give me funny looks when I say that or ask for it, though.

I'd totally believe that different mineral concentrations in water could lead us to different health outcomes. I also started taking a (highly bioavailable, to avoid diarrhea) magnesium supplement occasionally and the first time I tried it, I recall waking up the next morning feeling more relaxed than I'd felt in years. Maybe I'll try calcium, although I do consume a pretty solid quantity of dairy.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#272

Post by panglott »

kough wrote: post #201
pyromine wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a healthy athletic 20 year old and I was having back pain for a while, and when I finally went to the doctor they suggested it may just be an imbalance in the strength of different muscles in my back that I didn't properly train for the sports I participate in. Gave me some exercises, and a month later back pain was all gone and my back felt stronger, with better posture. Crazy what can be done when you just have…

Got any links to similar exercises? I'm also early 20s, spend most of my day sitting at a desk, have dealt with backpain for a few years. Pullups (especially wide-grip) have helped but I'd like to know some stretches, too.

I'm in my 30s, but get most of my exercise from cycling, which doesn't exercise the back much. My back pain problems have been increasing over recent years, but I've had good success in the last few months with 15-20 minutes a night of yoga. I'm doing regular plank, bridge, locust, and downward dog poses for back strength, and cat/cow, sphinx, and forward fold poses for back stretches. I like a lot of the leg and hip stretches, too.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#273

Post by blister »

Anecdote of one: I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkins Lymphoma two years ago. My _only_ symptom at the time was pretty severe back pain, which is unusual for lymphoma.

After treatment and remission a year later, I still had the severe back pain. The cancer pain management doctor I was seeing was perfectly happy to keep prescribing godlike levels of opiods. (50+ mg of oxycodone on top of 30+ mg of slow-release morphine pills).

After a few months, I lamented that I was tired of taking pills and dealing with all the side effects. He offered to send me to Physical Therapy, but explained that most of his patients preferred to stay on the pills and that PT rarely worked.

After 3 weeks of twice-weekly 30 minute PT sessions, my back felt amazing. No more pain and I was able to quickly wean off the drugs.

At some point, my cancer had caused back pain, which I'd continued to worsen by avoiding exercise and sitting at weird angles to alleviate the pressure.

As a humorous aside, I had to pay for several weeks of PT out of pocket because my insurance did not consider it important. They would prefer to shell out $500+ dollars every month to see a pain management doctor and continue taking pills.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#274

Post by andrewla »

avip wrote: post #165
femto wrote: post #16

I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of a morning routine of 15 minutes of exercise at home, targeting the pelvic muscles. The only equipment required is a floor mat, if the floor is hard. I started gently and naturally progressed to a higher level, taking the attitude that there is no hurry, because I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life, so there is plenty of time to progress. My initial routine…

>I can personally vouch Which is the opposite of science. What other 15m routines have you tried, in a double-blinded manner? Something can help you, and still be a hoax. No contradiction.

I don't know why this is being downvoted -- it's the first sensible thing that I've seen here. For example, from the article:

> Spinal fusion surgery, for instance ... costing a total of $40 billion per year ... ... with a price tag averaging $80,000, [and] has a success rate of about 35%.

That's not a success rate of 0%. If you look around, you'll find tons of people (175k/year if my math is right with the numbers above) who have had success with spinal fusion surgery -- one such person actually posted below!

At least this particular approach (light mat exercises) can't be properly called a scam, since it doesn't really try to trick you out of money. The fact of the matter is that the back is tremendously complex, and this approach, when analyzed across a large sample of back pain sufferers, might have an even worse success rate, especially considering the symptomatic divergence of people reporting back pain.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#275

Post by pavel_lishin »

DanBC wrote: post #184
seanwilson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And bitch all you want about "western medicine", but if you have a heart attack, or need a kidney transplant, or break a bone - you're probably going to choose the western system. I always find it weird that people can't see alternative medicine is only used by advocates on problems than tend to come and go by themselves or are susceptible to placebo effect but any time something serious comes up like the problems…

You're pretty sniffy about the effects of long term pain which can be debilitating, even life threatening. Some people who die by suicide were in long term pain. And here's a large, we'll run, study showing acupuncture is more effective than sham accupuncture https://discover.dc.nihr.ac.uk/portal/article/4000672/acupun...

> And here's a large, we'll run, study showing acupuncture is more effective than sham accupuncture

For headaches:

> Acupuncture is currently recommended for the prevention of chronic headaches, but not for musculoskeletal pain or osteoarthritis pain.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#276

Post by pavel_lishin »

erentz wrote: post #69
pavel_lishin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, you're taking a god-of-the-gaps approach to acupuncture. "It hasn't been proven to be ineffective for condition X, so keep your mind open!" Second, they have run good trials on many of the conditions acupuncture claims to cure. You picked the one paragraph that might be interpreted to support your claim: > It's a shame that Western science seems so intent on dismissing non-western treatments and techniques, ra…

> There's no reason to not try acupuncture, if you've got the money for it, I guess. It's not likely to hurt you. Make sure they wipe the injection sites with alcohol and use properly sterilized or disposable needles. (Give it with the same expectations you have for an injection.)

I knew someone would point this out :)

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#277

Post by tim333 »

visarga wrote: post #256

For 10 years I had a chronic back pain. It was like burning behind my shoulder blades. I went to doctors, did exercises and massage. No effect. Then I happened to take a Calcium supplement. Pain went away in 30 minutes. Now I am pain-free. Why couldn't the doctors detect my lack of Calcium and recommend a basic supplement in so many years? I think there is a lot of bullshit in how they deal with this kind of issues.…

In fairness to your doctors that would be a hard one to diagnose.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#278

Post by dec0dedab0de »

thenomad wrote: post #220
thesunny wrote: post #28

I haven't posted in a while but had to jump in on this. I had very bad back pain before my first daughter was born. I wanted to be able to carry my daughter when she was born so I decided to try everything, whether I believed it would work or not. I had massages, shots injected directly in the back, manipulation, and basically lots of different doctors and specialists. Nothing worked. Since I said I'd try everything,…

One thing I've definitely learned about musculoskeletal problems is that you shouldn't discount apparently unscientific treatments if they seem to work. There's a lot we don't know about how that particular system functions, and things like acupuncture seem to fit into that. That's not to say the explanations they give for why things work are accurate, but the treatment itself seems to work sometimes. I'm not advocat…

The Trigger Point Therapy workbook has helped me quite a few times. I learned about it from a fictional character in a book called Sex Drugs and Blueberries, which is also a good read.

Re: The $100B per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

#280

Post by vonmoltke »

panglott wrote: post #254
mirimir wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been strong selection, I suspect, for overeating when food is available. Also for focusing utilization on essential stuff when it's limited.

It's not mere availability of food. Obesity rates vary quite widely across OECD countries; the US is at 35%, France/Italy/Spain are at about 5-10%, Korea is below 4%. Overeating is a stress response for a lot of people, and overeating often occurs among people in high-stress situations. The US is a country that tolerates a very high level of poverty, inequality, and insecurity, and this results in high obesity rates…

Where are your numbers from? According to Wikipedia's summary of a 2014 WHO report the US is at 33.7%, France is at 24%, and the major Anglo nations in between. There is not nearly the disparity between the US and the rest of the world you claim.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Body_Mass...

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