Sunday Snippet: Active X Backs – An Effective Long-Term Solution to Lower Back Pain

Today’s Sunday Snippet is from the health non-fiction Active X Backs – An Effective Long-Term Solution to Lower Back Pain.

Name of author: Gavin Routledge

Target audience age range: 30+

Does your book contain any explicit content: No

Format, ISBN and date published: Wire-bound paperback, 01.01.2017, ISBN 978-0-9956708-0-8

Name of publisher: Active X Backs

Book link on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/active-backs-effective-long-term-solution/dp/0995670803/

Synopsis of Active X Backs – An Effective Long-Term Solution to Lower Back Pain

This book is the ultimate guide to the relief and prevention of lower back pain. It s a work-book which you will use to create your own plan for recovery, drawing on the knowledge gained from the heavily illustrated, easy to read text. You will put together your own action plan and exercise program, monitoring your progress with the Backscore. Although easy to digest, the book is based on international clinical guidelines and has a strong focus on keeping your motivation front and centre.

Name of chapter: Welcome to The Cliff of Pain

Welcome to the Cliff of Pain

That’s my phrase to describe the journey into and out of pain. It really feels like a cliff sometimes, and the risk is that once we fall off, we never find our way back up to the top.

If this is your first episode of Lower Back Pain (LBP), there’s a 60% chance you’ll have another episode within a year. So, when the doctor told you that “Low back pain is self-limiting – you’ll be fine in a few weeks,” he didn’t give you the full story.

Many people experience the back pain yo-yo effect, with episodes coming and
going over a period of months or years. The unpleasant truth is that having had
one episode of back pain, your risk of having another one doubles!

In between episodes, you may like to think that you’re fine, but we need to step back a bit to take a broader view of the Cliff of Pain, to understand what’s really going on…

The reality is that when you feel fine, you really only have the illusion of being fine – you’re often still on the cliff edge, where a small puff of wind (or trigger) can push you over, to end up back in that sea of pain. Then after a while, your journey out of pain just takes you back up the cliff, to leave you back on the edge once again.

Maybe you use some Relievers to get you up the cliff, or maybe time is all it takes, but either way, you’re still left on the edge with a 60% chance you’ll fall off it again within the next year – and an even higher chance if you’ve had multiple episodes before.

Time for a bit of self awareness:

Take a look at the Cliff of Pain model. Where are you on it? How many times have you fallen off? What pushed you off the
edge? Can you work out what may have put you on the edge in the first place?

This model explains why lower back pain recurrs so very frequently. If you only
try to eliminate the triggers (e.g. avoid bending), something else will push you over the edge sooner or later. If you only use Relievers, you’re still on the edge, with another episode just waiting to happen.

If you want to change your life and stop the regular recurrence of pain, it is vital to adopt the Cliff of Pain model to help you understand why your back keeps going wrong – or fails to recover at all. Don’t get all wound up in the anatomy of what’s wrong with your back. Forget anatomy. We have to look at this bigger picture and stop worrying about the anatomical details. If you’re reading this book I would guess that worrying about the detail hasn’t got you very far as yet! And that is the same for all bad back sufferers!

In the pages that follow, we’ll explore each of the elements within the Cliff of Pain:
• the Risks that put you on the edge in the first place
• the Triggers that tend to push you off,
• the Aggravators, that prolong your pain
• the Relievers and Preventers that will help you.

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This post was submitted by the author Gavin Routledge.

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