Hurting your back from a sudden twist, jolt or poor lifting technique is something we can accept as a hazard of living. But when you become suddenly incapacitated by an excruciating back pain as you reach across the table or sit relaxed on the couch, it is a real enigma.
You did nothing to cause it yet you feel as though someone just belted you with a cricket bat.
The majority of back pain sufferers, according to the American Medical Association Guide to Back Care, have soft tissue or muscleo-skeletal problems such as strains, spasms or inflammation that neither show up on x-rays nor yield to surgery.
Interestingly, in less sedentary cultures where people are more physically active and less subject to the stress of modern lifestyle, back problems are far less frequent.
It points the finger at stress and anxiety as being a major contributor to back pain.
How does stress affect health? Dr John Sarus (author of Mind Over Back Pain, Berkeley Books, N9) says that anxiety causes tension in the muscles which constricts blood vessels and reduces the flow of blood to muscles and nerves. This reduced blood circulation causes chemical wastes to build up, causing pain and spasm.
He calls it Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) and says that the pain of herniated disks, slipped disks, pinched nerves from bone spurs, spondylosis, strains, sprains and sciatica etc is an unconscious substitute for anxiety.
When we consciously accept that fact we open the way for the pain to lessen or disappear.
Some of the new energy therapies support this idea by virtue of their being able to frequently bring very rapid relief simply by using techniques that release emotions from our conscious and subconscious.
Because pain itself causes anxiety, TMS compounds itself and becomes self-perpetuating. If a conventional diagnosis is frightening, this can add further to the anxiety.
Another factor in how you perpetuate the pain is the fear of exercise. What having pain does is make you tend to avoid any activity which you think might trigger the pain or make it worse. This loss of normal, enjoyable and necessary activity serves to increase your sense of inadequacy and bring yet more stress to affect your health.
It could be that subconsciously creating this back pain distracts you from your psychological anxiety. The more central the pain is to your existence the less you focus on your other problems, family, relationship, financial, career or whatever.
By understanding how your mind does this subconsciously in order to avoid the stress of problems that it thinks will affect your health mentally, you can begin to take the proper steps. Rather than addressing the pain directly you may be able to confront the reasons for the anxiety and find the road to full recovery. This addresses the cause rather than the symptoms so the pain becomes irrelevant and disappears.
Be aware also that exercise itself enhances recovery by being a major stress reliever.
The real cause of most back pain may be mental and the effects definitely physical but the cure is both physical and mental.
