If you start losing fluid from an intervertebral disc two things start to happen: 1. The disc loses bounciness and becomes a more sluggish spinal connector and this allows the outer wall of the disc (the annulus fibrosis) to shrink and lose stretch. The simple stiffness of a spinal segment sets it up for trouble. This shrunken outer ’skin’ of the disc is easily traumatised by the myriad jolts and jinks of everyday activity and since this is the ONLY part of the intervertebral disc with a nerve supply the local inflammation registers as pain. This is the most likely explanation for ‘simple back ..read more

Most people submit to spinal surgery in desperation. After weeks, months (sometimes years) of a crippling pain and - alas! often quite useless - ineffectual conservative treatment, they're simply too worn out to keep on fighting. They're looking for a quick fix. In the following article you will read that simply getting a second opinion may spare you inappropriate surgery but most patients feel committed; too dazzled by the surgeon's hard sell, caught like a kangaroo in the headlights, to put up any kind of fight on their own. Besides, they often think 'who am I to judge' and many feel a nuisa ..read more

Spinal fusions are much less readily performed these days and there's good reason for this: residual pain. The pain may be just as bad or worse after surgery (with or without sciatica) or the back may be passably okay for a few years but then starts to become problematic again. There are several reasons for lingering back pain after spinal fusion. 1. The spinal fusion was done for the wrong reasons 2. Post-operative scar tissue chokes the spinal nerves. 3. The next level up above the fusion suffers excessive movement strain. Modern Medicine is just as susceptible as many other disciplines to g ..read more

The fancy neck pillows with a raised ridge along the front are also bad, although they do attempt to address one aspect of need - and that is support for the neck itself. Supporting the neck (as well as the head) is essential and much better brought about by tucking a pillow in around the neck to support the angle between shoulder and neck and this is critical to good neck relaxation. 
The best pillow-filling medium is feathers and it’s been that way for centuries! Why would we think that some modern material could do it any better? 
The best feather pillows are a combination of 80% feather 20 ..read more

What happens as you get older is that you inadvertently forget to push off with the knee by bracing the knee back hard. Before you know it, you have lost this propelling forward function of the knee straightening. The vastus medialis muscle - the medial quadriceps muscle on the inner side of the thigh – wastes away and get weak incredibly quickly (this is why you have wobbly knees when you get up after spending a day or so in bed with the flu). After failing to walk by squeezing the knee back you find you can’t, because the inner quads muscle has wasted away. Not only does this give you a plod ..read more

So we're not talking about the upper body here (because what makes the old person look old in the upper body is being stooped forward like a boomerang – bottom at the back and head bent low at the front). Here we're talking about what it is in the leg department that characterises an old person’s walk. There are three joints to consider – the ankles, the knees and the hips. But in the modern era it is the knees that give us the most bother (and that wear out first). And believe it or not, in a typical case of chicken and egg, it's very much the way we walk as we get older that speeds up knee b ..read more

This video takes you carefully through self-treatment of one-sided back pain and sciatica ..read more

With so many injuries associated with them, the question has to be asked: are deadlifts bad for you ..read more

This goes to the very heart of what makes bad backs bad. The kernel of the problem is always a function fault, greater or lesser, at one of the spinal links. Whatever the cause, the automatic response is for the long spinal muscles is to go into protective mode automatically switching on to splint to the back – making it stiff – which wraps it up (should be) temporarily and takes it out of action. If it stays longterm there are a couple of unwanted consequences that make things worse, namely the reflex inhibition or switching off of two other important muscle groups – the deep spinal muscles o ..read more

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