A recent survey by the Confederation of British Industry found that, although British workers are taking fewer sickies – just 180 million sick days last year, the lowest number since 1987 – the usual suspects are keeping them away from the office: "mental health issues" such as stress, anxiety and depression, and good old-fashioned back pain. According to the Health and Safety Executive, back pain is a particular bane of workers doing manual labour, delivery work, repetitive tasks such as packing, and those in sedentary roles. As our economy is increasingly dominated by financial and other services, burgeoning numbers of white-collar workers fall into the latter category. And back pain is the inevitable consequence, with eight out of 10 Britons hit by a dodgy back at some point.
I feel their pain. Decades of spinal abuse have taken their toll recently, as my forty-something body finally ground to a halt. I have, it must be said, had a good run: years of joint-punishing marathons and general pavement-pounding, adventure racing, football, tennis and Thai boxing, all at full throttle, ignoring the niggly injuries. Then, the clincher: a stooping, slouchy posture and a decade's desk-jockeying, glued to my Mac for up to 12 hours a day.
And boy, have I paid for it. Decades of lower back pain finally graduated to full-on sciatica recently – a whole different order of agony. The evil sciatica (when the sciatic nerve that runs from the back of your pelvis, through your buttocks and all the way down both legs, gets compressed or irritated) struck last Christmas, after an especially stressful and overworked period, sending scalding pains shooting from my back, through the left buttock and down the hamstring into my calf. Not fun.
Over the years, I've enriched a wide variety of back-crackers, from osteopaths to chiropractors, physios to acupuncturists, deep-tissue massage bruisers to dainty shiatsu girls; yoga, hot packs, cold compresses, anti-inflammatory pills ... been there, done it, got the invoice. (It's worth noting that, of all these approaches, only osteopathy gets the nod in Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh's book assessing the efficacy of complementary medicine, Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial.) And even the best of these approaches share a common flaw: variously effective at relieving your symptoms, but when the pain's drained away you slip back into old, destructive habits. For me, that means walking with Chaplin-esque splayed feet; a terrible stooping habit I picked up as a shy, gangly teenager; forgetting to prise myself away from the Mac every now and then; and my passion for running, a seemingly healthful pastime that's actually a pounding assault on your musculoskeletal system, especially on London's unyielding pavements.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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