Be careful about back pain
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By Lee Seung-hun
How is your back after the holidays? With multiple hours of driving through holiday traffic jams, many fathers will be suffering sore backs.
After countless minutes spent bent over pots and pans while sitting on the floor to prepare holiday food, many women may complain of a sore back too.
Lumbar pain is a common illness that 8 out of 10 people experience at least once in their lifetime.
The symptoms can vary from light pain where the patient feels the back stiffen after a prolonged period of sitting in a single position, to somewhat more severe pain where the patient feels uncomfortable even with the slightest movement and needs to lie down, to chronic pain from a herniated lumbar disc which brings shooting pain and numbness through the legs and feet that may even require surgery.
A number of factors can contribute to back pain. The fact that our back is in constant usage, whether you are working, exercising or even resting, makes the muscles and tendons surrounding the back prone to injuries as they are constantly tense.
A recent survey revealed that modern men spend about 55% of their time awake in a seated position. What many do not realize is that more weight can be loaded on the lumbar spine when seated than while standing.
As we eat, drive, study or work, watch TV, and spend quite a lot of time sitting, it just means more opportunities to injure our backs by putting more load on our backs than we can withstand.
With the correct sitting posture, the weight load on the back is almost negligible, but many of us slouch and stoop when seated, which can put quite a strain on the back that can cause pain. Especially for us Koreans, who have traditionally sat on the floor rather than on a chair, even more weight is put on the lumbar and can be very damaging.
Sudden weight gain can cause back pain without any other reasons. Weight gain, especially around the belly, can aggravate lordosis (commonly known as “saddle back”). Such unnatural curvature can put severe strain on the lumbar and result in a herniated disc.
Those with weight gain of only about 4 to 5 kg can complain of back pain if it occurred within a very short period of time, and the good news is that the back pain can be alleviated without special treatments if that weight gain is reversed.
Most common back injuries occur when lifting a heavy object, but surprising number of patients do injure themselves for something very trivial as picking up a pen from the ground or even from sneezing very loudly.
If your back muscles are chronically in tension due to your lifestyle, or if the muscles are very weak from a lack of exercise, it is likely that your lumbar is not in good health and can be prone to injuries even with something as innocuous as picking up a piece of paper.
Most of the readers are probably aware that stress can result in knots in the shoulder region, or even induce gastritis or gastric ulcers. By the same token, stress can also cause back pain.
Oriental medicine categorizes back pain into about 10 types depending on the causes. They include the aforementioned reasons, as well as an overly active sex life, or depleted qi in the kidneys from natural aging.
In Oriental medicine, the lower back is the region where kidney qi manifests physically. Kidneys are the organ where our primal energy gathers itself and weakening of such qi can make the patient feel gradual pain in the back in the mornings and evenings.
For such patients, medication (known as “boyak” in Korean) is prescribed to replenish the depleted qi.
Overeating and excessive drinking can result in back pains as well, in which case the treatment calls for aiding the digestion process to alleviate the back pain.
There is also back pain that seems to get worse with cold weather, or with wet weather as the cold qi or wet qi has invaded the patient’s body. Treatment then involves addressing the back as well as prescriptions to dispel the cold/wet qi out of the body.
The symptoms and causes for back pain are very diverse and thus the proper treatment requires that you pay a visit to a clinic for a proper diagnosis.
What becomes as important as the medical treatments is managing back pain and caring for your back in your daily life. Many patients ask if treatments can guarantee no future recurrences. Unfortunately, while treatment can alleviate the pain completely, there are no such treatments that will ensure the patient will never suffer again.
If your daily habits are damaging to your back, pain can recur eventually.
If you know that you have a weak back, maintaining a proper posture is a must and strengthening the back muscles through regular exercise can definitely help.
While there are many exercises that can benefit the back, even simple walking can strengthen your back muscles.
Remaining in a same posture for an extended time can stiffen the back muscles to aggravate the back pain, and thus changing your posture every now and then is recommended.
If you are an office worker who tended to sit in front of a screen for very long periods of time, you can help yourself immensely by standing up and lightly stretching yourself every half an hour or so.
The writer practices oriental medicine at the UN Oriental Medical Clinic in Hannam-dong, Seoul.