Please note that I have no relationship with the products or services I describe here. I developed this site partly to encourage me to put more effort into fixing my own back, but also to inspire others to go take control of their own back care.

Hopefully you may find some of the ideas here useful, and maybe can discuss them with your doctor.

If you find mylowerbackpain.com useful, please add a link to it from your website or blog.

Thanks, Steve.

The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion

by steve
(mylowerbackpain)

By Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittines.

The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion isn't a book specifically about back pain - it's about our overall condition and how, due to our sedentary lifestyle, we have let our bodies slip out of their natural state and into conditions of chronic pain.

Pete Egoscue, an "anatomical functionalist" in San Diego, strongly believes that the human body isn't as frail as is sometimes made out. Knees aren't weak joints, back's shouldn't cause problems. It's only when, for year after year, we abuse our bodies by forcing them into unnatural positions (for example, sitting for hours at a day) that dysfunctions build in and it's those dysfunctions that eventually cause the problem.

All because we don't allow our bodies to behave in the way nature intended.

Pete Egoscue's book was like a bolt from the blue when I first read it - and over the last few years I have begun to realise more and more just how much danger we put ourselves in simply by moving away from the lifestyle that nature originally designed us for. And I don't just mean our sedentary, car-obsessed, computer driven lifestyles but also the food we eat and the chemicals we use.

But back to the book. The book identifies three "conditions" and includes stretching regimes to address all three.

Me, I have conditions I and II - and I still have them despite having owned the book for a couple of years now. (Condition I is the one that gives me most problems.) I think the problem is fundamentally that once I've sorted the back pain, I lose the impetus to carry on with the exercises - so I stop the stretching (which can take up to an hour). And as a result I still have the underlying conditions that are causing me pain.

However, just because I (so far) haven't had the discipline to stick with the regime doesn't mean I don't think this is a great book.

Pain Free: A revolutionary method for stopping chronic pain

by steve
(mylowerbackpain)

By Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittines.

Pain Free was the first Pete Egoscue book I read, and it lead me to his others. Reading Pain Free for the first time was like a revelation - Egoscue explains that the human body is a robust system that has evolved over thousands of years. It's designed to function for decades - without pain.

And yet, we abuse these wonderful bodies of ours. They're designed to move, but instead we force them into sedentary positions for hours at a stretch, day after day, year after year. No wonder they start to cry "foul".

This explanation just makes so much sense to me, and over the years I've begun to realise that it makes sense in other ways (this isn't the time to start talking about the food we eat...)

Anyway, Pain Free offers revolutionary method for stopping chronic pain and it does it by providing a series of exercises and stretches that aim to remove the dysfunction and put your body back into its natural alignment.

The book is split into sections that start with an introduction and work their way up the body covering the major joints and problem areas - ankles, knees, hips, backs and so on. (Make sure you read the section on hips - the most important chapter in the book.) Each chapter concludes with exercises to ease your pain - and because everything is connected, you often find that to ease your painful ankle or shoulder, you'll do something that adjusts a misalignment in your hip or somewhere else.