I was interviewed for an article in The Daily Telegraph about low back pain, where I talk about the problems with the recent study that (predictably) found that 90% of low back pain treatments don't work.
From the article:
❝One fundamental problem is that large studies like this one put all types of low back pain into the same category of ’non-specific low back pain’ — meaning that it doesn’t have a clear identifiable cause such as a fracture or a tumour,❞ says Marlow.
❝But of course, there’s no such thing as non-specific back pain, just like there’s no such thing as non-specific knee pain — one of my clients, for instance, had poor ankle mobility from an operation to fix his club foot. He had spent his whole life moving through his spine whenever he had to pick something up, which led to a herniated disc.
A key part of his rehab was improving his ankle mobility to direct stress away from his injured disc. What people need is a thorough assessment to determine the cause of their pain. Unfortunately, this takes time and skill — the assessment that I take my clients through takes three hours to complete, which for obvious reasons of cost and time doesn’t fit very neatly into an overstretched medical system like the NHS.❞
Big thanks to Joel Snape for getting in touch and including me in the piece.
