Can smoking cause back pain? Will bed rest relieve a sore back? Test how much you know about your back with our Everwell Challenge.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Sooner or later, most of us will experience some type of back pain. But how much do we really know about how best to deal with it? Play along with our Everwell Challenge to check out your back facts. Are they in line or out of whack?
1. First question: which of the following factors increase your risk for back pain?
A. Smoking
B. Being overweight
C. A desk job `
D. High heels
2. What’s the safest way to lift and move a heavy object?
3. Bed rest is a good treatment for back pain. True or false?
4. Which of these is best to relieve low back pain?
A. Lie flat on a hard surface
B. Bend down, trying to touch your toes
C. Take a walk
D. Sit on a sofa or padded recliner
5. What is the underlying cause of most back pain?
<b>Answers:</b>
To work out the kinks, we consulted back pain expert Dr. Kathleen Fink.
1. Actually of the above can end up increasing your back pain. Smoking increases your back pain, it decreases your blood flow to the nerves.
Unlike smoking, the other three risk factors cause back pain by disrupting the natural curve of your spine.
Being overweight increases the pressure across your back. You increase the weight forward in front of your spine and it tends to pull your body forward.
Sedentary jobs generally are associated with higher back pain because people are not doing the normal amount of activity they would throughout the day, they’re not changing positions.
High heels, when someone is standing in high heels, they tend to have to over arch their back to keep their body weight back and that tends to increase back pain.
2. The safest way to lift and move a heavy object is to face it, to have your hips facing the object, to bend slowly, bend your knees, lift with your legs, picking up the object and then turning to put it somewhere else. The worst thing you can do is bend down from the waist and twist at the same time.
3. Bedrest is not a good treatment for back pain. When you’re in bed for a long period of time, your blood pressure can go up, your heart rate can go up, you can lose muscle strength, you shouldn’t be at bedrest for more than approximately two days.
4. C. Taking a walk is the best to relieve low back pain. You want to do a relatively easy amount of activity to try to keep the muscles moving.
Lying flat on your back can be helpful but you need to put something under your knees, a pillow, a cushion, to take some of the pressure off of the back and have your back laying flat.
Bending down to touch your toes can help in some situations to stretch the muscles, but there may be better stretches that you can do, such as pulling your knees toward your chest.
And laying on a padded sofa or recliner doesn’t give you enough support to help with back pain.
5. We don’t know the cause of most back pain. Back pain comes from multiple factors, it could be muscle tightness, ligaments, discs, nerves, there are multiple causes of back pain but 80 to 85 percent we don’t know the exact cause of back pain.
The good news: most back pain will go away on its own within two to three months.