Surgery

Less than 1 out of 100 people actually end up needing surgery for back pain, and, whilst 80 percent of adults will experience some form of back pain at one or more times in their life, 50 percent of them will never find out the cause of their pain. Interviews with patients months and years after their surgery has revealed that over ninety percent still feel pain and seventy percent have not been able to go back to their normal activities.

It is my experience that at least 85 percent of back pain is attributable to muscular causes. The point I make strongly in all my books, articles and interviews is that a disc doesn’t bulge and a joint doesn’t ache or become misaligned for no reason. There is always some form of underlying muscle imbalance causing pressure to build – which ultimately results in the back problem.

Bad backs are a frequent reason people opt for surgery, yet studies show that bulging discs usually shrink over time and that disc problems clear up in the vast majority of patients, especially if they have sought treatment for the underlying muscle imbalances that caused these problems in the first place.

When surgery is recommended to repair a damaged disc or fuse the vertebrae to keep it in the correct position, it doesn’t deal with the muscle imbalance underneath. This muscle imbalance is usually always the cause of the problem in the first place and has to be addressed first to ensure that surgery has any chance of lasting success – if it is still required. Not doing so would be like replacing a tyre on your car that is worn on one side without doing a wheel alignment. The new tyre might look ok for a while but would be under the same pressure and before long be worn out the same way.

Whilst statistics show that around 50% of back surgeries are successful in the months following, there are no statistics that assess a person five or ten years later. You can be pretty sure that patients who don’t recover from surgery had significant imbalances prior to surgery which were not addressed. Muscle imbalances keep putting pressure on the spine and over time that can easily cause the pain to come back either in the same area, or in a joint above the one that was operated on. The worst thing about surgery is that it often masks the presence of the imbalance for a time, perhaps months or years, adding to the deterioration of the body, and, when the pain does come back the body is that much older, weaker and more difficult to fix.

Imbalances cause a body to become tight and inflexible. They cause certain muscles to become dysfunctional, they restrict circulation to the area and cause tissue to begin deteriorating and become weakened. The longer it is left untreated, the more difficult it is to reverse this deterioration and get the body balanced and working properly again. There are only a small percentage of people who have had ‘successful’ back surgery and can go back to a physical lifestyle without suffering a relapse or another chronic pain somewhere else that is also coming from the same muscle imbalances.

If surgeons understood the implications of the muscle imbalances and worked with a therapist who could fix them, not only would so many of the surgeries be unnecessary but the ones that were necessary would be a lot more successful in the long term.

Before you agree to back surgery, consider getting a second opinion from a qualified spine specialist. Spine surgeons hold differing opinions about when to operate, what type of surgery to perform, and whether — for some spine conditions — surgery is warranted at all. Back and leg pain can be a complex issue that may require a team of health professionals to diagnose and treat.

So the moral of my story is that no matter what type of back pain you have, whether you’ve been told you need surgery, or even if you have already had surgery, you must, as part of the recovery process, have your muscle system rebalanced by an expert SLM trained therapist.