In this episode...Eradicating Back Pain with preventative care...saying no to cut and swallow pain management techniques and remove 85% of all back pain related sick days...circa 10% of the total sick days!
Dr. Barry Harpur is an Osteopath and a researcher with University of Portsmouth where he is leading a defining study that will set out the global standard for assessing back pain and developing pro-active maintenance programmes.
Why does this matter? In the UK 12.5% of all sick days are due to back pain. The UK spends £12.5bn a year treating back pain and the US spends $100bn on treating back pain with over 500 000 spinal fusions every year. "So what" you say....I know I did until you hear Barry telling you that 85% of all backspin is not specific. There is no diagnosis other than back pain. What are they treating them for he asks? They are treating them for pain and operating on them when we know the source of it is somewhere else. Once you have gone under the knife you have had it! So as with so much about human health it is lifestyle related.
Sedentary lifestyle, smoking, overweight, stress are all contributors. Yet, we have control over it and this is where Barry brings some real hope.
Our bodies are built for entirely different movement regimes than we enforce today. Barry sets out that our forward orientated view of the world needs to be supported by training on 3 plains of movement and in the episode he shares some of his finding into the backpain phenomena and his work on injury prediction.
I quote Barry: We have an epidemic of backpain and and once you push the button on surgery it is game over. We need to work on a preventative care programme to really make a difference. Here are 2 examples:
If you cannot laterally sidebend evenly left and right have a 60% chance of developing non specific back pain
People with no curve in their back or a very large curve, hyper-lourdosis, have 15% more likelihood to develop non specific back pain.
But we can influence these areaeas and reduce the back pain.
Barry is building an app that will be able to support a very quick clinical test based on the most valid and reliable tests which he will teach people while creating a standardised test that can be used by all healthcare practitioners worldwide. How they asses back pain will be standard but how they treat it will be their own treatment protocols.
The industry is run by financial gain and pain is designed and built in the mind yet with this new protocol there is a better model for healthcare to test. How this standard for backpain develops will be fascinating. Imagine reducing the 12.5% of sick days that are attributed to it by 85%!!!
There are 6 key exercise that Barry teaches for people to help themselves. " We build the body from the ground up. If the foundation is off, the feet or the ankles , it will manifest up the spine and throughout the body" . Train people in full range of motion so that when they unexpectedly move in that way that they do not injure themselves.
Barry has a fundamental understanding of the problem of backpain at such a profound level that you have to think that anything we are getting this wrong .....remember 500 000 spinal fusions in the US alone! and that we have such a simple solution for.... must surely be able to break free from the bleeding edge and make it into our daily routine.
Dr. Barry Harpur practices out of the Kinesis Clinic in Portsmouth and runs a Digital Academy called Backpain36O.clinic
Connect with Barry Harpur on linked in here
Go to Backpain360.clinic here
The Bleeding Edge Podcast here
