Alternative Treatments for Back Pain Washington DC

By Bill Gottlieb

Peter Gulke, a screenwriter from Hollywood, was a guy who really used—and abused—his back. In high school and college he competed as a gymnast. After graduation, he picked up cliff diving and surfing. But it wasn’t the sports that did him in, at least not directly. One day in his late twenties, while raking the lawn, he reached for some leaves and felt an ominous twinge in his lower back. In that swift moment, he became one of the millions of people in this country who suffer from lower back pain.

He had to stop surfing, then jogging, then golfing. The pain would plague him for a few weeks, go away, then come back again. He tried chiropractic, acupuncture, herbs, muscle-relaxing drugs, mind-body techniques. Everything helped a little, but not for long.

Gulke’s story is so typical as to be almost a cliché. No doubt you’ve heard the statistics. Eighty percent of Americans will suffer a bout of debilitating back pain at some point in their lives, with a full 80 percent having one or more recurrences. Back pain sends more people to the doctor than any other illness except colds. For Americans between the ages of 30 and 50, medical costs to treat back pain are higher than they are for any other health problem.

And how is that money spent? On thousands of operations—even though some studies show that four years after back surgery, patients fared no better than those who hadn’t gone under the knife— and on millions of prescription drugs, like anti-inflammatories and narcotics, that only temporarily ease pain. Of course, some of the alternative remedies that didn’t help Gulke, like acupuncture and chiropractic, do have good track records. But the moral of the back story seems to be that no single treatment works for all people all the time.

That’s why alternative and conventional healers alike have been hard at work seeking new solutions. Some are based on a new understanding of how the back works and why it starts hurting; others involve new approaches to pain relief. The following treatments are three of the most promising to gain credibility in recent years.

Exercises
to stabilize your spine
Until two years ago, Anne-Marie Howard∗, a 32-year-old laboratory technician in Halifax, Nova Scotia, considered herself lucky. She had spondylolisthesis, a congenital condition in which the front half of a vertebra separates from the back half, but she never experienced any pain.

Then her luck changed. By the time she walked into the office of Rick Jemmett, a physical therapist in Halifax and author of Spinal Stabilization: The New Science of Back Pain, she hurt every day. At work she spent most of her time standing. By noon she was usually in pain. By quitting time, she was in agony.

Jemmett didn’t give Howard the standard exercises prescribed by most physical therapists. Instead, he instructed her in highly specific but subtle move- ments involving the transversus abdominis muscle of her abdomen and the multifidus mus...

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