THE BOOKS

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Fix Back Pain

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Pain free

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The Egoscue method

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Pain free at your PC

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3 minutes to a pain free life

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Stretching

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Back in Action

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Back sufferer's bible

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The arthritis cure

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Alexander principle

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Better back

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Beating back pain

FIX BACK PAIN

John Miller

I'm going to send you through to the Global Back Care website where you'll be able to purchase not only the Fix Back Pain ebook but all the other ebooks in the Global Back Care series.

PAIN FREE

Pete Egoscue

This is the best book I've read on the causes and treatment of musculo-skeletal dysfunction. If you've got a crook back, stiff neck, 'cold' shoulder, bung hip, gamy leg, dicky knee or RSI, this book is a must.

I've been to Egoscue's clinic in San Diego as a paying client and I've been standing on his shoulders ever since. I do his exercises regularly and in the last year my back has gone from 10/100 to 95/100, (on a scale in which 1 is wretched and 100 is absolutely fantastic.)

Some of the opinions I got from the book are:

Pain Free has a clear and concise outline of the exercises you need to do to restore function. This book will do more for your musculo-skeletal dysfunction than any X-ray, MRI or Cat scan, any anti-inflammatory or cortisone injection, any rub down, crunch, hot wheat bag, electric shock or scalpel. It's a must buy and comes with my highest recommendation.

Regardless of whether you are a member of the pick and shovel or the sit down profession you need to read and digest what it says in this book. It will be a revelation.

It fits in well with the natural healing philosophy which says that you can do things which protect you from musculo-skeletal dysfunction or which can fix your musculo-skeletal dysfunction without recourse to therapists, chemists or surgeons.

And regardless of which profession you're in, there's a good chance that somewhere down the track you'll get a crook back, stiff neck, frozen shoulder, bung hip, game leg, dicky knee and RSI if you don't keep your body strong and flexible. Save yourself the bother. Buy the book. Do the exercises.

If you're an OH&S professional buy a copy for everyone on your staff. Make them read it and give them a test to see whether they understand the principles Egoscue outlines. Make them do the exercises. It will save you a poultice in compo claims and sheet home the blame for any musculo-skeletal rehab claim (especially for people in the sit down professions) back where it belongs!

It's the system stupid!

THE EGOSCUE METHOD OF HEALTH

THROUGH MOTION

Pete Egoscue

Every now and then someone from outside the sheltered workshops of academe comes along and not only knocks conventional wisdom into a cocked hat but also gives it a healthy boot up the backside.

The reason Egoscue gives for the epidemic of all manner of ills, including musculo-skeletal dysfunction is motion starvation.

The usefulness of the book is in the descriptions and illustrations of various types of misalignment and the exercises to correct them. You'll be amazed at what you'll see in the mirror after you've read this book! You'll be amazed at how useless an x-ray and the radiologists commentary is! Why useless? - because they don't tell you the likely cause of your dysfunction. They just tell you you have one (and you already know that: your back aches).

Egoscue has developed a system of exercises to correct the posture and stimulate the body's natural power to protect and rejuvenate itself. Once you're back in alignment you'll be pain free. Simple.

He uses simple explanations as to how we got ourselves into such an unbalanced mess in the first place.

This book should be a text book in every university and school and on every home and fitness centre bookshelf.

PAIN FREE AT YOUR PC

Pete Egoscue

This is another must read.

'Whatever pain you may be feeling, it is not caused by your PC (or your chair). And it cannot be cured by reinventing your PC or the way you use it.  ... The true source of chronic musculo-skeletal pain is rarely at the site of the pain'

After you've read this book it's going to be very difficult to blame the desk, the chair, the keyboard and the mouse for your sore neck, frozen shoulder and RSI.

Just like 'Pain Free', this book gets right to the point in identifying the cause of the epidemic of musculo-skeletal dysfunction .

So, sit up straight, strengthen the muscles that are designed to keep your upper body in correct alignment while you're typing, and stretch.

Take regular breaks, spend a few minutes each day sitting on the front of your chair with pelvis tilted forward (and a hollow in lumbar spine). The chair that will prevent musculo-skeletal dysfunction has not yet been invented, particularly if you spend most of your time in a slouched position with your pelvis tilted back and your shoulders hunched forward! Once the natural 'S' curve of your spine becomes a 'C' curve you're heading for big strife.

If you sit at a desk and particularly if you type for a goodly part of the day, you MUST buy this book and do the exercises.

THREE MINUTES TO A PAIN FREE LIFE

Joseph Weisberg

Joseph Weisberg, MD, introduces 6 exercises that he believes you need to do for 230 seconds a day to attain a musculo-skeletal pain free state.

He could be right and the book is definitely worth getting and the exercises worth doing. For a lot of people 3 minutes a day is definitely better than no minutes a day.

I like Weisberg's style. He gives his allopathetic colleagues a right royal bagging for the practice of junk medicine - where pills are used to mask symptoms and lead the gullible to believe that because their pain has gone away they're better.

His writing style and his ideas are deceptively simple. While his mates are making the cheap expensive, the simple complicated, the obvious obscure and gouging their customers to the tune of $90,000 for a 3 hour back operation, Weisberg suggests you do six exercises for 3 minutes a day.

It's just that simple.

Buy this book.

STRETCHING

Bob Anderson

This is an oldie and a goodie. There's a lot of physical educators, athletes and regular folks who cut their teeth on this one. Just good old fashioned, common or garden stretches for regular folks and sports people.

You can rank Anderson as one of the pioneers of the stretching revolution - from the old school, before it was taken over by yoga and Pilates and its latter day derivatives. He was good then and he's still good now.

Sports people will particularly appreciate the sports specific stretches.

What made the book popular when it was first published (and still makes it a good book) were the diagrams.

To sum up, the best recommendation for this book is that there have been more pages of it photocopied and passed around by well-meaning teachers, fitness instructors, coaches and physiotherapists to people who are too mean-spirited to buy it themselves than any other stretching book in the history of the world.

Do Bob and his wife (the illustrator) a favour and buy a copy.

OVERCOME BACK AND NECK PAIN

Kit Laughlin

Kit Laughlin from Canberra is a master of his trade.

Stretching is his life and you can see it stretching further and further out for years to come by the way he keeps himself in exceptionally good shape. He is stretching. That's what makes his work so authoritative and well respected.

He's trained thousands of people with crook backs and necks at the Australian National University where he and his staff run his courses.

The strengths in the book are

• the meticulous attention to detailing what particular muscles are doing when they tighten up

   

• the clear illustration of exercises to keep back and neck in good nick.

The authority comes from his background in oriental medicine and massage. He knows the body like the back of his hand. There are exercises to relieve the tension that so many people experience.

What Kit brings to strengthening and flexibility is his authority from years of training people. The best information you'll ever get is from a practitioner who is passionate about his work, is working on this stuff, writing, teaching, thinking about it 24 hours a day. You can be pretty certain that nothing as useful as this for backs and necks will ever come out of the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine or a Celebrex packet!

There are a lot of people in Canberra and around the world who've stopped swearing at the pain in their neck and now swear by the exercises in this book. Buy it.

BACK IN ACTION

Sarah Key

I found this an absorbing book from the moment I picked it up. I bought the copy from Key's Sydney office on morning and then raced through it during the day while my wife was shopping.

I like it when therapeutic practitioners are thoughtful about their work and prepared to write about it. It's a sign they're passionate and committed to helping, not only their clients but a much broader audience.

It’s optimistic. Cop this!

'Things deteriorate when a simple fault goes unchecked.'

'The good news is that the right therapy almost anywhere along the route of spinal breakdown can stop it in its tracks and turn it around.’

'The other good news is that you can do most of the rehabilitation yourself. Phase by less-painful phase you can steer yourself back out of the maze where you have been stumbling for so long.’

The book provides the reader with a clear and concise tour of the back and how the normal spine works, complete with excellent diagrams.

The treatment for the various conditions are outlined with simplicity and with a few straight forward exercises. Keys recognises the importance of both back extension and flexion exercises and has a special note about toe touching from a standing position.

‘Bending and touching your toes has long been held by conventional wisdom to be dangerous. However, I believe it is crucial for your recovery.’

Keys recommends the Ma Roller or tennis ball to pummel a tight joint capsule and give the joint more freedom to move and the BackBlock as a way of achieving disimpaction of the neurocentral core and restoring the optimal lumbar hollow. It does this by stretching the front of the hip flexors.

Keys has a few warnings. e.g.

‘Removing a disc may not be removing a problem; it may worsen it. If indeed the facet is the main source of pain. Wholesale disc removal obliterates the disc space and brings more pressure to bear on the facets.  After the operation, leg pain is worse ... '

Keys takes a timely opportunity to have a  dig at the medical profession:

‘Conventional orthopaedics has never recognised segmental stiffness as a subliminal spinal disorder – far less felt for it with the hands – which makes it abundantly clear why our two strands of medicine to this day remain so divergent.’ ‘There is nothing better that human thumbs to feel the state of play of the facet joints.’

All up it's a good book for anyone with a crook back. The descriptions, diagrams, exercises and optimistic tone make it a must buy for anyone who wants to understand back pain better.

Charles Windsor sums it up when, in the foreword he says

'Visualising what is happening inside the back makes it much more logical and easy to see why Sarah Key’s exercises really do work.'

So, if it’s good enough for Chuck ...

BACK SUFFERERS’ BIBLE

Sarah Keys

The gospel according the Sarah Keys? Segmental stiffness, muscle spasm, spinal compression. Fix that and you’ve fixed your crook back.

Seen through the eyes of the physiotherapist this is a good book. It contains good explanations of a variety of back complaints, including  the stiff spinal segment, facet joint arthropathy, acute locked back, prolapsed disc and segmental instability.

(Too few do: many are stuck in a time warp, doing the same things they were taught donkey's years ago in the sheltered workshop for the academically gifted.)

This is Key's first book, written in1986 and revised in 1991.

As well as Sydney, Sarah Keys, who has rooms in London and is physiotherapist to Charles Windsor. She has some insightful things to say about crook backs, their causes and what to do about it. Her first chapter is compelling reading for anyone who doubts whether they can fix up a crook back. What she says makes good sense, something often missing in the world of selective evidence, symptom masking, pharmaceutical-based, dependence generating, blank cheque medicine.

'If you wonder why it is so important for a back to let us know when things are wrong, the answer is simple: the longer the spinal function faults go unchecked, the more strain suffered by the skeleton as a whole. The role of pain is to bring faults to the forefront of our consciousness so they stand a better chance of being fixed.'

My dentist takes the same view of pain saying 'your pain is my friend. It tells me where to go looking for the cause. Then I can decide what to do about it.'

The book has a useful question and answer section, focussing on what different modalities can do for your back.

Does tension make my back worse?

What exercises should I do?

Should I lose weight?

What shoes should I wear?

Which is the best chair?

Is sex bad for my back?

Strictly speaking anyone who has a slack tummy is sure to be a lousy lover.)

It has some useful exercises and introduces readers to the back block and the Ma roller. (If you want to save yourself from the rack, get a BackBlock!) I've purchased a Ma Roller and I can tell you it's a very useful device for giving the muscles on either side of the spine a good workout.

This is part of Key's approach of encouraging you to do things for yourself, rather than rushing off to a therapist every time you feel a twinge. I think highly of any practitioner who teachers you what you can do for yourself, rather than keeping you on the drip feed.

THE ARTHRITIS CURE

Jason Theodosakis

This book has become a best seller because it puts forward, in a reasonably scientific yet readable way the case for taking the dietary supplements

• glucosamine

• chondroitin sulphate.

The book goes into the whys and wherefores of osteoarthritis and what the products do for it. They work by helping to repair damaged cartilage.

I know from personal experience that it works. Having worked in the fitness business for years and years, my heels became very sore and the first few steps every morning were painful. Someone suggested glucosamine and chondroitin sulphate, which I started taking and the soreness soon went away.

I've noticed that the Arthritis Foundation has given it's cautious assessment for these products, though the arthritis charities of the world are still off with the fairies at the bottom of the garden when it comes to exercise and diet! But if you think this is a bit 'fringe', just ask around and you'll soon find someone singing the praises of these products - along with omega 3 fats. There's a host of testimonials around the precinct where I work.

Theodosakis also includes recommendations on alignment, strengthening etc. It's a good book for anyone with osteoarthritis. Worth getting.

The powder is also worth getting. Give it a go for a few months. You've got nothing to lose. You'll find it in any good health food shop.

THE ALEXANDER PRINCIPLE

Wilfred Barlow

Wilfred Barlow knew Mathias Alexander. As one of the great man's most respected practitioners Barlow was authorized by Alexander to be responsible for ‘all matters pertaining to his work’.  You can't get a better recommendation than this!

What I like about this book is it’s clear outline of what Alexander was on about and as it says so eloquently in the first chapter

'It also provides a way of looking at those well-established and time-honoured dogmas which, in the words of Paracelsus 'are not worth a gooses turd'.

If you’re into health, into accepting responsibility for the functioning of your musculo-skeletal system, into accepting that things going on inside the head are likely to be manifest somewhere in the body this is a book worth having and a philosophy worthwhile getting your teeth into. Whether you’re a physical therapist or a mug punter with a crook back, when it comes to postural alignment and what to do about it,  this book will heighten your powers of observation.

The quotes below speak for themselves.

What else did I get out of it? An appreciation that an X-ray in itself is a pretty useless tool unless it is accompanied by still and/or moving pictures of people in various positions and thereby providing clues as to the likely causes of the dysfunction. Strange indeed that the still photography and video professions aren’t making as much money out of musculo-skeletal dysfunction as the radiologists!

Do yourself a favour. Buy the book and do an Alexander Technique workshop.

BETTER BACK

John Tanner

I originally reviewed and recommended John Tanner's book Beating Back Pain, which you can read below.

As I write it's out of print, so sight unseen I'm recommending his Better Back book instead.

Do you suffer from a bad back? Are you uncomfortable at work or at home? Unravel the causes of injury, diagnosis and treatment options with this self-help guide. It aims to help you to make informed choices on your options from conventional and complementary treatment for acute and chronic pain.

BEATING BACK PAIN

John Tanner

Produced under the imprimatur of the British Holistic Medical Association, I liked this book from the moment I picked it up.

Normally you wouldn't touch anything endorsed by a medical fraternity or an arthritis charity with a barge pole. The former usually recommends the latest drug passing through town and the latter puts their hand out for a donation. However the Holistic Medical Association is a different kettle of fish.

Beating Back Pain lives up to the reputation of an holistic approach, outlining a range of modalities that can be used to fix up a crook back.

It contains good descriptions of the likely dysfunctions associated with back pain and how a range of modalities may impact on your dysfunction. It seems to be the case that most therapists stick within their own therapeutic modality; eg chiropractors usually forget to give a good selection of exercises; physiotherapists rarely suggest you go to the acupuncturist; symptomatic medical practitioners usually don’t refer down the feeding chain to physical educators … or anyone else who doesn't wear a white coat! (I salute the many doctors and therapists who don't fit into this category.

My personal belief is that you’re more likely to speed up the recovery process if you stack the modalities up one on top of the other and treat the rehabilitation process as a full time job. Most of the rehab clients I see do less in a couple of months than a serious sportsperson would do in a day – ice, heat, strengthen, stretch, postural realignment, mobilization, acupuncture, hydrotherapy, morning tea, then repeat the process three or four more times during the day. Most of the treatment I see lacks frequency and intensity. That’s why most musculo-skeletal injuries take so long to get better.

The slowness of the repair lies within ourselves, dear Brutus!

In summary, the exercises aren’t bad. The diagrams are good. It’s a useful and readable text.