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Why do you have low back pain?  Why does everyone seem to have low back pain if not all of the time, at least at one point in their lifetime?  Why do the same people continue to see healthcare practitioners without a complete resolution of their issue? 

I’ve explored some lifestyle causes of low back pain and how the choices you make in everyday like can increase your risk of injury.  

Here, I’d like to get into the specifics, physiologically speaking, of what is going on with low back pain and offer some theories as to what causes it to be so prevalent. 

Culturally, what are we doing wrong?

Courtesy of t-nation.com

As I’ve mentioned before, we are hunters and gatherers.  The standup hominid as we know it split from the ape species approximately 7 millions years ago.  Homo erectus?  2 million years ago.  Homo sapiens as we are today?  150,ooo years ago.  

Genetically speaking, there has not been enough selective pressure to cause us to evolve further.  Let me explain.  Selective pressure exposes genetic weakness that causes an individual to die before he can reproduce.  It may be an inability to outrun a predator, a compromised immune system leading to infection, or a tolerance of mutations in our DNA that leads to organ malfunction.  These are all things that previously would allow us as a species to evolve, where the weak die before being able to reproduce, so “survival of the fittest” holds true. 

In today’s world, we prolong life through any means possible.  There is widespread overuse of antibiotics to keep us alive, allowing bacteria to evolve at much quicker rates than we can to fight the infection.  We operate on those with organ dysfunction, finding anyway to squeeze days, months, or years out of our lives, as unpleasant as they may be.  We vaccinate with dozens of chemical concoctions to prevent even the slightest possibility of disease, as minimal a risk as it may be.  All of these actions we take allow the weakest of humans to make it to reproductive age so that today, our genetic code is the same as it was 10,000 years ago, or even weaker. 

With the same DNA as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we spent our days hunting, gatherering, running, playing, cleaning, working, etc.  The key to this lifestyle is that we were always moving and using our bodies (or more specifically, our musculoskeletal systems).  We didn’t begin life as a child in first grade, where we’d sit in our desks for 6 hours a day, well into high school and college, where we’d continue to sit.  Then, we’d get a 9-to-5 job, where we’d sit some more.  Finally, we’d come home and plop our butts in front of the television, to sit our lives away. 

Sitting is the bane of our existence and a primary cause of obesity, depression, and musculoskeletal pain today.  Following the ‘use it or lose it’ principle, it allows us to lose muscular strength, endurance, and flexibility through inactivity.  Why would we need these necessary components of health when we’ve resigned our bodies to sitting so much of our time?  [click to continue…]

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