A look at the History of back Pain

Back pain is not something that’s new to us. Between these times and the beginning of the 19th century back problems were looked at in a completely different way. The problems were simply diagnosed and treated in the same way every time, the patient was told to lay on their back and rest. The Doctors of the times thought that movement and exercise would cause the back more pain, and from this minimising movement was curtail for the recovery of the back.

Back pain still is not fully understood today but it wasn’t till the turn on the 20th century that back pain became a more common occurrence. It was known as Industrial pain and it has increased dramatically between WW1 and WW2.

Back pain was also a problem in the 19th century but was still not understood then. The earliest reports of the 20th century came after the introduction of the railway. It wasn’t the railway development that caused the problem but railway accidents. It was post-traumatic symptoms of passengers that were often passed off as fakers who first developed the symptom knows as ‘railway spine’ or ‘Erchsens disease’. #

Railway collisions were very common in the 19th century, making the problem worse was the fact that the railway carts were flimsy, wooden structures that did not provide any protection for the passengers. The Problem of ‘railway spine’ was debated in depth between ‘John Eric Erichsen’s’ who named the disease, and a number of other doctors and academics who came up with a number of reasons for the disorder. It was most likely to be caused by the seating in the train, and more so for the passengers who had their backs in the direction of the acceleration as they experienced a sort of whiplash.

If I refer back to earlier in my essay it is apparent that back pain today and around the 19th and 20th century is completely different. Back pain used to be mostly initiated by an accident, whereas nowadays it is the sedentary lifestyle that a high percentage of us live in that are the problem.

“Not only is low back pain the most common cause of work-related disability for people under age 45, but it is also the most costly, with most of these expenses from workers' compensation payments and medical bills.”

Who would have thought when the initial office based job could lead to such a great problem that is back pain? Back pain costs the NHS £5 billion a year alone. That is a scary amount of money, and especially when the biggest reason for the pain is us, the people of the U.K.