Opinion

William Scholes: Aching to get in front of back pain

William Scholes

William Scholes

William has worked at The Irish News since 2002. His areas of interest include religion and motoring.

With back pain so prevalent, why aren't there public health campaigns about managing the causes and symptoms?
With back pain so prevalent, why aren't there public health campaigns about managing the causes and symptoms? With back pain so prevalent, why aren't there public health campaigns about managing the causes and symptoms?

THERE is a great line in G.K. Chesterton's masterpiece The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. Well, there are a lot of great lines, but the one I'm thinking of comes early in the novel sometimes described as a 'metaphysical thriller'.

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."

You just don't hear that kind of stuff from Dan Brown or in whatever Richard and Judy are flogging this week, do you?

One of the reasons The Man Who Was Thursday is at the front of my mind is because Chesterton is always talking about backs.

One of the central characters has a back so enormous that he is "too large to see", causing another to imagine that "the face would be too big to be possible".

What the backs of objects and people might signify about their fronts is a motif of the novel. A spine, if you will, holding everything together.

I have been thinking a lot about my own back, though less in the metaphysical Chesterton sense and more in a physical, racked-in-pain kind of way.

By the time you read this, I am hopeful that the acute lower back pain which has variously incapacitated, frustrated and hobbled me for the last 10 days will have receded.

Sitting at a desk was so painful that the only way I could work was by propping my computer on a windowsill and standing at the keyboard like someone rejected from a really poor Kraftwerk tribute act

Certainly, at the time of typing it is a lot better than it was, thanks to some thoroughly helpful physiotherapy, not to mention the strategic placing of a hot water bottle. And a writing position that, if I were to adopt it at my desk in the Irish News, could see me hauled before a tribunal.

I've been here before - the back pain, that is, not the tribunal.

A few years ago, simple tasks like getting out of bed unaided, shaving or pulling socks on or off became tasks worthy of Hercules. It left me stooping and hiding my face, as G.K. might have put it.

Sitting at a desk was so painful that the only way I could work was by propping my computer on a windowsill and standing at the keyboard like someone rejected from a really poor Kraftwerk tribute act.

MRI scans revealed worn discs and a lot of physio and targeted exercise allowed me to eventually leave Kraftwerk and return to my desk.

And so my sore back has grumbled away for years, flaring up for a day or two most weeks.

A regime of a long walk before work - it helps loosen up everything and warm the muscles - has been a big help in making a day at a desk less painful.

But the savage ferocity of my latest affliction is perhaps a warning against complacency, a reminder of the need to vary my exercise and, in every sense of the word, stretch myself.

The whole thing is maddeningly frustrating. I can understand why a lot of people with back pain also end up with depression.

If you fall off a ladder or get hit by a forklift truck, then you can rationalise the pain because the reason for your injury is obvious.

That isn't so in my case, or that of most other people with lower back pain. The most dangerous thing I have to do is press ctrl-alt-del when the computer freezes and wait for Windows to update itself. Again.

My latest spell lying on the floor has given me the chance to read up on back pain, to the extent that my web browser presents me with adverts for 'luxury hospital apparel' - who knew? - and details of clinics 'guaranteeing' to cure bad backs; anyone who says something as stupid as that deserves, in my book, to be treated with the same distrust as people who can tell the difference between Ant and Dec.

The bad news is that back pain has become so common that to not have it is abnormal; the good news is that it can be managed.

There are public health campaigns about bad diets, smoking and drinking too much. But when back pain is so prevalent, why is nothing been done to help us get in front of it?