The NUMBER 1 Cause of Back Pain

[dave1234]

Last one, then I’ll get on to getting rid of back pain, plus preventing it from happening in the first instance.
The most overlooked cause of back pain worldwide is the pelvis. Problems with the pelvis are present in every single person whom I’ve seen or worked with who has back pain. Why doctors do not address this area first is beyond me. When a house is built, the most important component is the foundation. If the foundation is tilted, so will the rest of the house be. The pelvis is the foundation for stability for the whole body. Although all the other things I’ve been chuntering on about are important to back pain problems [ forward head and shoulders etc ], by far the pelvis is the key factor.

http://academic.kellogg.cc.mi.us/herbra ... lvis_c.jpg
http://www.sandbox.de/osg/stl/pelvis.png

Basically, the pelvis has three components:

1. A left side [ or ilium ]
2. A right side [ or ilium ]
3. The sacrum [ a triangular shaped fused group of bones ]

Each ilium has a piece that comes to the front of the body, called the pubic bone. Each side has a pubic bone. The pubic bones join together with a small [ and not well known ] piece of flexible material called the pubic symphysis. It acts like a universal joint in a car and can bend and twist in different ways. More on that in a minute. Each ilium attaches to the sacrum on either side via a joint called the sacro-iliac joint [ SI-joint ]. This joint is surrounded by [ normally ] tight ligaments . When there are problems with this joint, it can mimic back pain exactly, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who have had back surgery to no avail because the doctors could not diagnose an SI-joint problem. I’ll put a separate posting on this. If you’ve ever walked off the pavement and not been aware of it, or thought there was one more step to go when walking up steps, that “jolt” you felt was from your SI joint.

There are two very important muscles that can cause the pelvis and lower spine to go out of balance;
1. The iliacus
2. The psoas

http://www.realbodywork.com/learn/hip/psoas.jpg
http://www.octc.kctcs.edu/GCaplan/anat/ ... age278.gif

The iliacus lines the inside of your hip and is a fan shaped muscle. The top part is physically attached to the inside of the hip and the bottom part is attached to a little piece of bone on the upper inside of your thigh bone [ femur ] called the lesser trochanter [ LT ]. When a muscle gets stronger, it bulks up sideways and contacts lengthwise. Imagine you are standing up, feet nailed to the floor. Legs can’t go anywhere. Now, imagine that the iliacus muscle contracts. What would happen is this: The iliacus is attached to the pelvis [ ilium ], so the ilium would have to rotate downwards. The other end is attached to the LT, and the LT is attached to your leg, so that end is not going anywhere. Now, as the pelvis is rotating downwards, the sacrum must do the same, as the pelvis is attached to the sacrum via the SI joint. But, the sacrum is also attached to the spine:
http://www.trcc.com.au/images/medpics/spine_1.jpg

This puts massive stress on the base of the spine, causes your legs to rotate backwards slightly, and causes “knock-knees” [ bye the way 90% of all foot problems do not come from the feet directly, but as a result of problems further up – I’ll put a posting on that later ]. As the pelvis rotates forward, it tries to pull the whole top of your body forward. The brain recognizes this and sends signals to the muscles along the spine to tighten up to keep the body stable. When they tighten up, they press against nerves inside the muscles, and lo and behold back pain. The muscles are doing what they are supposed to do – keep the spine straight. What do doctors do ? Give you muscle relaxants instead of looking for the source of the problem. If you only get relaxants once in your lifetime, then that’s OK. But, if you keep getting back pain, and keep getting prescribed those things, something else is going on.

The next major offender is the psoas

http://trippcrosby.files.wordpress.com/ ... /psoas.jpg

This incredibly strong muscle attaches to the LT, but also to the bones of the spine [ vertebrae ]. When it contracts, it does two things:
1. It causes the pelvis to tilt a bit [ not as much as the iliacus ]
2. It bends the spine

When the spine bends, the pressure on the disks increases, they lose water, they become brittle, then a herniation occurs. The solution - get the pelvis back to neutral.
There are other problems that can occur:
If the iliacus is tighter on one side than the other, that side of the pelvis will rotate more than the other [ because the pubic symphysis can bend ] and you end up with a twisted pelvis and pain in your hips. Ever had hip pain that you just couldn’t get rid of ?

When the psoas gets tight, it literally pulls the femur [ thigh bone ] up into the socket. Over time this pressure will wear away the cartilage. This is the root cause of most hip replacements in the UK.

So what causes these muscles to contract strongly ? In civilian life it is our western lifestyle. Think about how much time we spend sitting each day. We sit for breakfast, dinner and lunch. Some sit at an office desk all day long. Then it’s home and sit watching the telly. When we are sitting, both the psoas and the iliacus get tight.

On the military side, bergans are the worst offender. Body tilted forward, compressing the psoas and iliacus. Quads get very strong, pulling down on the front of the pelvis.

I spent twenty five years working in third world countries [ Nigeria, North Yemen, Pakistan, Tajikistan etc ] and saw horrific diseases, but can’t remember seeing anyone with back pain. It does occur there, but is not common. These people live the way their bodies were designed to work; walking, carrying water, cutting crops, looking after animals. Their bodies are in constant motion.

In the next few postings, I’ll talk about reversing this damage.

Dave

[dave1234]

The pictures of the woman before and after show the results obtained from “rolfing” – a very deep tissue massage using elbows. Not for the faint-hearted, but gives great results. I’ll talk more about this later.

http://www.phoenixcentre.com/bodywork/b ... guage2.htm

http://www.foxvalleyrolfing.com/clients ... 66_sta.jpg

http://www.foxvalleyrolfing.com/clients ... 58_sta.gif

http://www.smileenhancer.com/images/sub/skeleton.gif

Classic symptoms of someone with a forward tipped pelvis [ for a non-obese person ] are:

1. Belly protruding outwards

2. Butt sticking outwards

Dave

[dave1234]

All that was wrong with this woman [ the second one in the program ]was a forward tipped pelvis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyHd9XEKq0w

Dave