For The Young and The Old: Back Care

by Baxter

From Yoga: The Poetry of the Body by Rodney Yee with Nina Zolotow

Back in the day, say 20 years ago or so, when I was a Family doc back in Cincinnati, every day someone came into my office with the problem of low back pain. And if it was your average run-of-the-mill, muscular strain-style back pain, regardless of what I had to offer, things usually got back to normal in about six weeks. However, for the smaller percentage of patients whose pain did not resolve in that time frame, difficulty often lingered for much longer, and there were a myriad of possible underlying causes to account for the situation.

My tools at the time included medications, referrals to physical therapists, and finally consultations with specialists like orthopedic or neurological surgeons. The latter two groups were often interested in offering surgery as a solution, since that was their main “tool” of healing. However, the results rarely matched the billing, and often these same patients would return following a procedure with little or no change in their baseline symptoms.

To say the least, I found myself very frustrated with the repeating scenario I was a part of. What I had to offer did not seem to be very effective; the patients were also frustrated, anxious and worried about what the future held for them. At that time, in my community, hatha yoga was not mainstream, and certainly was not looked upon as a possible therapeutic option for addressing chronic pain of any sort. Fortunately, the winds of change started blowing at just the right time!

As I began to explore yoga personally and eventually transitioned into teaching and using it therapeutically with my students, it became very clear again and again how helpful yoga practice is in addressing not only the root anatomical, kinesiological issues in back pain, but also in providing prompt benefits for the mental and emotional issues that arise due to chronic pain: anxiety, depression, frustration and disappointment. I suspect that we will return to talk about back pain a lot over the coming weeks, months and years, so today’s post is really an opportunity for me to give you some background thoughts on low back pain and chronic pain in general, with an eye to expanding and addressing more specific issues as we travel along together. Update: See here for further information (and a sequence of poses).

In the meantime, I recommend you read Brad's post from last week (see here). He makes some very important observations regarding the research that has been done to date on this issue, and again reminds us all that ultimately we need to do our own personal study of yoga on our health, sometimes with the caring and expert guidance of our yoga teachers and sometimes on our own.

There are a more and more good books available to all of you out there to get you started on applying hatha yoga techniques to healing your back pain. Now classics are Mary Pullig Schatz, MD’s 1992 Back Care Basics, which is grounded in the Iyengar tradition, and TKV Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga, which is not specifically a back yoga book but introduces a different and equally powerful method of working with yoga and your body. And if you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join me any Monday night at Piedmont Yoga Studio (see here) for my ongoing series of Back Care Yoga. Until the next time, happy backs to you! 

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