Defining Back Pain

To engineers, a "stress concentration point" is any place where forces come together in a potentially harmful way.

Now consider your lower back. Your upper body and lower body contain large muscles, and each works independently. They're joined at your lower back, an intricate "hinge" of bone, muscle and ligament. If you lift, twist or reach in the wrong way, many kinds of forces come together in a way that can easily throw that hinge off.

It's no wonder that 85 percent of Americans have lower back problems at one time or another. Most of them experience low back pain more than once.

During any year, it's typical that about two percent of U.S. workers will receive compensation for a back-pain disability.

Just like the old saying, "you don't know what you got till it's gone," it's hard to realize how critical your lower back is until it starts calling attention to itself through back pain.

Causes of Back Pain

Most back pain begins when you're straining your muscles, overusing your back, or when you injure the muscles and ligaments that support the spine. Less often, sickness or a deformity of the spine can cause the pain.

Physicians divide up back pain into three types:

• Acute back pain is over within 3 months. For most people it's gone after 4 to 6 weeks of treatment at home.
• Recurrent means the back pain has happened more than once. This is a likely scenario for many people.
• Chronic generally means the back pain has lasted longer than 3 months.