Stay active, don’t rest in bed
Research has visited a similar change of heart on the most traditional and seemingly innocuous recommendation for back pain — a day or two of bed rest. In a 1995 English study, doctors asked twenty patients with acute back pain—pain that had been present for a week or less—to rest in bed for forty - eight hours. They asked a second group to avoid any bed rest between 9 A.M. and 9 EM. Most patients in both groups improved significantly within a week, which is typical in acute back pain episodes. But more patients in the active group had fully recovered in seven days than in the bed - rest group.12 Other studies have shown the same thing. For most people, bed rest actually slows recovery. By staying active, patients keep the back flexible and improve blood flow.
A research team in Oslo, Norway, decided to prescribe the opposite of bed rest for a group of 463 people whose back problems were serious enough that they needed to take at least eight weeks’ absence from work. They were encouraged not to rest, but to stay active and flexible to enhance blood flow to the back and speed up repair. They had to resist the urge to guard their backs too much with inactivity and were told that “the worst thing they could do to their backs was to be too careful.” To put this study in perspective, people who have already missed eight weeks of work have a 60 percent chance of still being out after six months. The researchers found, however, that keeping patients active cut that figure to 30 percent.3 Aerobic exercise has also proven useful for spinal stenosis, replacing the immobilization that was once routine.
Just as many doctors were becoming resigned to the uselessness of their treatments for chronic back pain, we came to find that the body has ways to heal itself even more effective then ultram. They are not perfect, but when doctors resist the urge to immobilize patients or to operate when it can be avoided, the body can gradually recover in many cases. Indeed, a new, more optimistic view of back problems is emerging, and it comes from a look at the underlying cause.
