We probably all think about time travel at least once in our lives, you know, going back and undoing something abysmally stupid or asking him out. That kind of thing. The question that comes up is, what else would it change? I've decided the one thing I would do is lift with my knees. I can't see that living without back pain would seriously impact where I am right now.
I can look back now on the years of tossing around 40 pound containers of pizza dough with abandon and helping friends move - oh to be in college with a car! - and all the other things you do when you're young to prove you're strong. I really should have lifted with my knees.
The really interesting thing about back pain is that it doesn't always exhibit as pain in the back. That shooting pain going down your left leg when you've stood too long or walked too far? That's probably actually back pain.
The back, with its three sets of vertebrae - cervical up through neck, thoracic through the middle and lumbar down to the coccyx - is responsible for supporting most of your body. As a consequence, there are nerves tied into your back that you don't always suspect. This means that a lot of the pain in your extremities comes from an insult to some portion of your back. This is one more reason to take care it.
Failure to use proper body mechanics is only one cause of back pain. It is also probably the least modern. If you think scything grain all day allowed for ergonomically correct positioning, you need to go back and look at the textbooks again.
However, our modern world has an added an even more insidious cause of pain to our lives. This is one we tend not to expect or think about because of the way we associate things.
Usually muscle or joint pain is connected, both physically and in our minds, with overwork or overuse. Tennis elbow, rotator cuff injuries, arthritic knees, all of that kind of thing. Thus, we do not tend to consider how very bad sitting at a desk all day can be for our spines and back muscles.
This is not in the sense that slouching will give you a hump. It won't unless you were already genetically inclined that way.
The truth is that we aren't really designed to sit all day, every day. Our bodies evolved for climbing trees and running across the savannahs in hopes of not being eaten. Sitting is not overtly bad, and, as anyone with back pain knows, it can feel really great, but doing it all the time actually puts strain on the back muscles and causes the subsequent back pain.
This is insidious because the one thing no one wants to do when her back hurts is move. So, we sit, and strangely the pain only gets worse, because the muscles that would normally hold us up, get weaker and don't want to do the work asked of them. Sadly, taking it easy can often lead to very expensive treatments.
