A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and funded by the National Institute of Health suggests that medication is not the best option when dealing with neck pain.

In the study, they tracked 272 patients for 12 weeks. What they found was that those who used a chiropractor, or those that used exercise, were more than twice as likely to be pain free than those who took medication.

With all the kids heading back to school this week after the school holidays, I got thinking about schoolbags and the effect they can have on growing children.  I see children walking to or from school hunched over due to the weight of the heavy bags or bags that are almost the size of the child carrying it.  So what effects can carrying heavy bags have and what is the ideal weight for a school bag or backpack? 

Some interesting new research has shown that you can actually “change” your brain through thought itself and that mental effort can actually result in physical changes to your mind and body.

When imagining an action, it requires the same motor and sensory programs in the brain that would be used if
you were actually doing it.  New research has shown that those who mentally practiced playing the piano achieved the same accuracy level as those who physically did it. 

On the same note, people who imagined doing strength-training exercises increased their muscle strength by 22%, compared to 30% among those who physically did the exercises.  Taking this a bit further, the research showed that when you focus your mind on a specific muscle during a workout, you work that muscle 22% harder.  So by focusing on what you are doing at the gym can enable you to get a better workout.

In fact, just believing that your daily activities are exercise has also been shown to improve physical fitness. Harvard researchers informed one group of hotel housekeepers that their daily work qualified as exercise, whereas a control group did not receive this information. Four weeks later, those who believed their work was a form of exercise had a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index, even though their behaviors hadn’t actually changed at all.

For those of you that have been to see me in my practice will know that I am a big believer in functional movement, movement patterns, flexibility etc.  I am also interested in simple ways to test general movement,
flexibility, coordination and so on. I came across some interesting Brazilian research recently.  They have
developed a simple screening test of musculoskeletal fitness, called the Sitting-Rising Test (SRT).  This test, put simply, is your ability to sit and then rise off the ground. Their research indicates that this test may predict your longevity in the next 5-6 years. 

One of the questions I get asked a lot in the clinic is, “is my back sore because I am overweight?”  It is a hard
question to answer and I usually respond by saying that I see people of all sizes with back pain so it is not the only reason your back is sore, however, being overweight may not help the situation.  In the book The
Physiology of the joints by Kapandji, it says that every extra 1lb of weight a person is carrying equates to 10lb extra pressure on the discs in the lower lumbar spine.  This is quite a big effect and can account for some of the pain an overweight person feels.  This extra pressure on the discs can lead to problems like wear and tear and disc bulges and could also slow down your recovery time.  

Carrying extra weight can also lead to problems with other joints, especially the knees.  The flip side of this, is
that if you lose weight it can have a big effect on the joints. An article published by Harvard Health Publications stated “In one study, the risk of developing osteoarthritis dropped 50% with each 11-pound weight loss among younger obese women. For men who get their body mass index (BMI) down from 30 or higher to between 25 and 29.9, knee osteoarthritis would decrease an estimated 20%. A similar change in women of the same age could cut the incidence of osteoarthritis of the knee by about 30%”. 

Losing weight can help your joints and your recovery, but it can also have a huge effect on the risk of future health problems. We have all heard about the benefits of weight loss for general health reasons.   For example, a 22lb weight loss can reduce the risk of heart attack by 75% and weight loss can help reduce the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes and can help normalise blood pressure etc.  There is tons of information out there about this topic that is very interesting.  I may talk about that more in a future post.

The idea to take from this blog post is that being overweight may not necessarily be causing the back problems you are suffering from but may a contributing factor.  As with any problem, you need to have it assessed to see what the cause is and get it corrected.  Losing weight will help take some pressure off the joints and help protect them, but it will also help improve the overall function of your body.  If you have any questions or have a problem that you would like to have assessed, please contact us, and we can get you started on your road to recovery.