Spine sugery is a young science — although the conditions it corrects are very ancient
February 25th, 2008
I hurt my back one summer’s day, after we’d come back from our summer holiday and I was cleaning the car. Somehow I managed to lean over the wrong way and when I picked up the hose off the ground the weight sent a sharp twinge across a part of my backbone.Ouch!Somehow I managed to finish the car and hobble inside carefully. But I was at the physio’s next morning. She gave me a simple (so simple!) set of exercises and a couple of weeks later I was well on the way to normal. No spine surgery. Actually not even a machine. No xrays. No special implements. Nothing high tech. Now, a year later, there is not even a suggestion I was once unable to lean off the vertical without a stab of burning pain through that section of my spine that I damaged.I presume this ability to fix a spine simply using exercises and care has been available to medical people for thousands of years. So it was a surprise to me today to learn that although back pain has been around since the day a worker on the pyramids of Egypt lifted his work basket the wrong way, we have only known much about it in the last 70 years.In fact the first scientific description of herniation of the lumbar intervertebral disc and the surgical treatment of the condition was published in 1934, by Mixter and Barr.
Entry Filed under: Health