Lower Back Pain (in brief)Headline: Back pain has always interested me simply because it is so common and yet even today, with all of our advances in technology and anatomical understanding, we really don't understand back pain as a whole. We have come a long way in just the last 10 years and beyond that, I I hope will will go a lot further. Perhaps the hardest thing we find in medical research however is convincing some clinicians that the old ways are not necessarily the best...
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Is it unusual to have low back pain?
In a word, no. In fact, most of you will experience spinal pain at some point during your life time. Research estimates that up to 90% of you will get low back pain (LBP), and 70% will get neck pain. To put that into context, the last census recorded in 2011 showed a UK population of just under 63 million. This means that around 56 million of you will get back pain and around 44 million will get neck pain. That’s a lot of people!
In fact low back is the most common reason that you will visit your GP if we remove both headaches and tiredness from the equation. When we put it like that, you may look at the problem of spinal pain and its burden on you and the economy (£10,668 million per year) in a new light. Unfortunately it is not a very exclusive club to belong to although I often say to patients that its better to be boring and common in medicine, rather than rare and interesting!
In fact low back is the most common reason that you will visit your GP if we remove both headaches and tiredness from the equation. When we put it like that, you may look at the problem of spinal pain and its burden on you and the economy (£10,668 million per year) in a new light. Unfortunately it is not a very exclusive club to belong to although I often say to patients that its better to be boring and common in medicine, rather than rare and interesting!
Where would I feel Low Back Pain?
The lower back is commonly defined as the area between the bottom of the rib cage and the buttock creases.
Will it get better?
For a vast majority of you, yes, in fact most ‘simple’ LBP and neck pain (not related to a whiplash injury) is thought to be self-limiting, settling within 4-12 weeks under its own steam. Unfortunately, this does leave somewhere between 3-10% of you, or up to 6.3 million who will go on to develop chronic low back pain, (same pain lasting for more than 3 months consecutively). Although this group is proportionally small, it accounts for nearly 50% of all resources allocated to the treatment of LBP. The bottom line is, it is impossible to stop everyone from developing chronic LBP even in today’s age of medicine, and we need to accept this fact. What we can do however is strive to limit this occurrence where possible, and help those of you where it is not preventable.
