The 90 degree stretch can be done against the wall.

Comment below on how these exercises work for you.

In the first one, come up on the exhale and relax down on the inhale.

In the second exercise, the spinal twist, it is tempting to let your top knee slide back and away from your lower knee. Don’t allow it. keep the knees right on top of each other. That will keep the lower back stable.

The third exercise is cat - cow. Inhale when you are looking up and exhale when you push your back up to the ceiling. Also, when looking up, do not let your abdomen drop. Keep some firmness there to support your spine.

In the last one, drop your heels as Carmen shows. This is more of a calf stretch.

Enjoy!

In a study that looked at patients who went to their doctor within three days of feeling pain, 90% felt better within two to seven weeks. No surgery. Here is an interesting look at spinal decompression which would help to heal faster.

You can do this by hanging off the end of a table with someone holding your legs down. No need for fancy equipment, just use gravity to increase the spaces between the vertebrae.

There are different types of spinal fusion where the surgeon peels away your back muscles and sets titanium screws into your back to hold metal rods in place. It is really only necessary when the vertebral bones have been dislocated or damaged and now endanger the spinal cord or nerves exiting the spine.

There is a much darker reason some people get spinal fusions. If someone has been in an accident at work and go to a lawyer, he may in turn refer the patient to a neurologist that will take an EMG, an electromyograph, which records the electrical activity of the muscles around the spine.

The diagnosis from the EMG is usually severe disk disease. Now the accident victim’s back really hurts! To get a diagnosis like that validates the real pain felt and makes it feel worse. If they decide on an operation, they may not have to, or be able to go back to work.

Remember too, that the fee for discectomy, cutting away a bulging disk, is $5,000 - $7,000. A spinal fusion earns the surgeon $20,000 - $30,000. The incentives are wrong for the surgeon.

What we are talking about here is a procedure that is supposed to determine which spinal discs are sensitive to pressure and causing pain.

You lie on a long metal table with your lower back exposed. The radiologist inserts a long needle, called a trocar, into your back until he reaches the edge of the disc above the one that is ruptured. Then he runs a fine needle into the trocar and into disk itself.

Then he takes something that looks like a syringe attached to a digital monitor and attaches it to the fine gauge needle that is in your disk. This will apply the pressure to the disk when the doctor presses the plunger.

When he applies the pressure, you are to say if the pain is familiar or something different from what you usually feel.

Effectiveness of Discography

Dr. Eugene Carragee, director of Stanford University’s Orthopedic Spine Center has studied the usefulness of discography. He found that 40% of patients who had no back pain after surgery still had significant pain when they underwent discography. On the other hand, 40% of patients who had serious persistent pain after back surgery had no pain when they underwent the procedure.

In other studies he found that patients who were depressed and anxious were more likely to find discography painful and in fact were some would have back pain for up to a year later.

So this is a useless procedure that on the face of it should give doctors good information. This points to the fact that it isn’t the condition of the disks that is the main cause of back pain.

Comment below and let me know what you think.

Health policy researchers Steven Atlas and Jonathan Skinner report in a just-released National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that levels of education exerted a strong impact on changes in the pain experienced by older patients with lower back pain and sciatica over a ten-year period.

For example,

The authors looked at a group of people who had herniated discs, many of whom underwent surgery for it. Then looked at them ten years later.

they find that for those patients who were college graduates, just 9 percent of them reported leg or back pain “always” or “almost always” after 10 years, compared to 34 percent of those patients who lacked a high school degree. Of course, this sort of research finding remains preliminary, and some further statistical adjustments could squeeze that gap between the highest and lowest education groups. Atlas and Skinner examine other possible factors (such as occupation, industry, marital status, brain structure, social norms, and disability payment incentives) in the differences in the resolution of pain over time, despite objective evidence for the same underlying clinical condition, across the overall group of patients studied. However, the differences in pain outcomes by education seem to hold across the entire distribution of disabling pain (from little to mild to moderate to severe).

This latest research is particularly interesting when placed in the larger context of earlier findings of a strong association between educational attainment and health, by such scholars as Angus Deaton, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and David Cutler; Michael Grossman; and Robert Kaestner. Just last month, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America emphasized the importance of education in early childhood development and lifetime health.

Another example of the effect of education on pain perception.

Among 50-59 year females, for example, pain rates ranged from 26 percent for college graduates to 55 percent for those without a high school degree. Occupation, industry, and marital status attenuated but did not erase these educational gradients

Why would education affect the way pain is felt? Leave your comment below.

“I was at home in the kitchen and I was just turning to dry my hands when it happened,” says Jane Morley. She was 65, in the midst of a full and active life in Highgate, north London, busy with her children, grandchildren, beloved garden, volunteering in the local Oxfam shop and supporting her Bafta award-winning documentary-maker husband, Peter. But in that apparently unremarkable instant, everything changed. She suffered a spinal cord injury and is now in a wheelchair.

Morley is one of the rapidly growing number of older people who have suffered spinal cord injuries. Until recently it was seen, by and large, as an affliction of the 18-35 age group, usually sustained in sporting or road accidents. But at the London Spinal Injury Centre, at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, one of the 11 specialist units serving the estimated 40,000 people with spinal cord injuries in Britain, the proportion of over 60s admitted has risen from 2 per cent in 2004 to 20 per cent last year. And other centres report a similar steep rise. It is, they say, a hitherto unreported consequence of people living longer, more active lives.

What Is The Spinal Cord?

The spinal cord can be likened to a column of wires (nerve fibres) transmitting signal from the brain to the rest of the body. It is protected by the of bones the back, the spine and vertebrae, and by the discs, circular pads of cartilage with a tough fibrous cover and soft, gel-like interior, that lie between the vertebrae. If the bones fracture or splinter, or the discs slip, they can slice into nerve fibres in the spinal cord, causing paralysis. Depending on where in the spinal cord the damage occurs, this can affect the arms, legs, and even the respiratory muscles.

“In older people,” says Angela Gall, a consultant at the London Spinal Centre, “the bones in the neck and back are more brittle because of age and so fracture more easily in domestic falls. Also the central canal that encases the cord grows narrower as you get older. That makes any injury to the neck or back more likely to result in damage to the cord.”

Spinal Cord Injury, Not Sciatica

“I was using crutches to walk at the time of my injury,” says Morley. “I’d broken my leg and I suppose I must have been moving about in an awkward way. As I turned to dry my hands, I felt this sudden, extraordinary pain. I couldn’t move my legs at all, but I still had some feeling in them. I assumed it was a severe form of sciatica.” Instead of calling an ambulance right away, the family GP was summoned. Painkillers were prescribed and it was only 24 hours later, alarmed that a feeling of numbness was moving up her body, that Morley was admitted to hospital. It was discovered that one of the discs between her back bones had slipped out of place and pushed into her spinal cord, interrupting the nerve connections to her legs. While slipped discs in younger people do not usually cause such serious damage – around 20 per cent create no noticeable symptoms – they are more common in older people and, because the discs degenerate with age, they pose a greater risk of damaging the spinal cord.

Delay Is Disastrous

There is, as yet, no viable way of repairing damaged spinal cords, though some research is now under way using stem cells. The emphasis is on achieving a good quality of life for those affected. One key factor in minimising the extent of paralysis is, immediately after the damage occurs, to keep the patient absolutely still until the back can be stabilised, often by operating. In Morley’s case, though, it was 48 hours before she underwent surgery. This is not uncommon: spinal cord injury is still seen as unlikely to happen to older people and often goes undiagnosed in those first crucial hours.

Patients usually spend a minimum of three to six months at a specialist centre, though many of the new wave of older admissions are tending to stay longer.because it takes them more time to adjust to their new circumstances and learn how to cope with life from a wheelchair. Half of all patients will retain some feeling and movement in the affected limbs – the proportion is higher in older patients – so rehabilitation programmes work on maximising that. There are also often problems with bladder and bowel control, as well as the broader challenge of mastering new ways to do everyday tasks from a wheelchair.

“I do sometimes wonder how much more movement I might have if they had realised at once what had happened to me,” says Morley, “but there is no point thinking that way. I can still do things from my chair around the house, though gardening is frustrating.”

Instead of her daily walks on Hampstead Heath, she now goes swimming and uses the gym each week at a sports centre in north London run by the spinal injuries charity Aspire. The building is adjacent to the London Spinal Injury Centre. While Morley tries out a specially adapted rowing machine, in the main sports hall Derek Bryan, a 76-year-old clockmaker, is rediscovering table tennis. When younger, he played at county championship level. Now, after a spinal cord injury, he is learning how to wield his bat from a wheelchair.

Bryan, from Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, is an in-patient on the spinal centre. He had thought his backache was one of those ailments of old age to be endured, but just before last Christmas he woke in agony and called an ambulance. He didn’t know it at the time, but he too had had a disc slip out of place, which pushed into his spinal cord. “I was told that if it was chest pain, they’d come right away,” he recalls, “but for back pain it would be up to an hour. I then spent seven hours waiting in accident and emergency before a scan revealed that a disc in my back had popped. It was a bloody disaster.” The resulting damage to his spinal cord has left his legs paralysed. He has now all but completed his rehabilitation, but his discharge is dependent on adaptations being made to his home so that he can get around it. “I have had to use my savings to pay for the building work,” he says.
…

Don’t Despair

There is also a challenging psychological side to deal with. “Everyone is an individual, but often we are working with people who were just setting out on retirement, full of plans and hopes, and suddenly all that has been taken away,” says Gall. “Some question whether they want to go on.”

Jane Morley knows all about such thoughts. “If I don’t get out a lot, I can get low, but I always try to keep a positive perspective and maintain my sense of humour. As my son said when he first visited me in hospital. ‘Just think, this could have happened to you when you were 20 not 65.’ It made me realise I was very fortunate.”

Spinal Cord Injuries

The spinal cord, which is about as thick as an index finger, is a bundle of nerve fibres, descending from the brain down the back. It is encased in the vertebral canal and transmits signals from the brain to the rest of the body.

The cord is very sensitive to injury from fragments of fractured bones or slipped intervertebral discs, resulting in nerve damage and possible paralysis. Injuries most often occur where the spine is most flexible, in the neck, and base of the rib cage, and paralysis occurs below the injury. The spinal cord does not have the ability to repair itself.