Deconditioning Syndrome true cause of low-back problems

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Shelley Hampton, a certified post-rehab and conditioning specialist, is owner, group fitness instructor and personal trainer at Shape Shifters Pilates Exercise Studio.|ret||ret||tab|

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Four common treatment patterns actually reduce the likelihood that employees will fully recover from back injury. Discouragingly, physicians routinely recommend three of these: Prolonged bed rest, a focus on structural problems, and the reliance on medication and surgery all contribute to what's known as Deconditioning Syndrome.|ret||ret||tab|

The typical American is deconditioned, the technical term for being out of shape. The term covers low-quality strength and muscle function, low-quality flexibility, posture and joint dysfunction, and excess body weight that stresses the back.|ret||ret||tab|

The result: a compromised body structure that must carry around an oversized load while it tries to perform high-level tasks such as lifting, reaching, pushing and pulling. These stressful activities occur in personal life as well as on the job.|ret||ret||tab|

The first and most harmful factor contributing to deconditioning is over-prescription of prolonged bed rest. |ret||ret||tab|

"Tragically, despite the best of intentions to relieve pain, our whole approach to backache has been associated with increasing low back disability," wrote researchers Allen and Waddell, authors of texts for health practitioners. "Despite a wide range of treatments, or perhaps because none of them provide a lasting cure, our whole strategy of management has been negative based on rest. We have actually prescribed low back disability."|ret||ret||tab|

In order to function properly, the body's tissues need a correct balance between movement and rest. Putting a person with a compromised lower back on bed rest further weakens the back muscles. Doctors have over-prescribed rest for musculoskeletal pain because they can't identify a structural point of origin for the pain.|ret||ret||tab|

The trouble is, if muscles are weak, tight and imbalanced, no amount of rest will restore them to proper functioning. Long periods of bed rest simply return employees to work as they began: weak, tight and imbalanced. Most people already sit and lie down too much; even a Surgeon General's report has stated that the vast majority of Americans do not move enough to remain healthy.|ret||ret||tab|

Researchers at NASA wanted to learn what would happen to muscles in zero gravity (which offers no resistance) so they put subjects to bed. They found that as few as 24 hours of bed rest could weaken thigh strength by as much 25 percent.|ret||ret||tab|

To paraphrase Socrates' observation from thousands of years ago: "If you do not move it, you will lose it!"|ret||ret||tab|

In addition to prescribing unnecessary rest, health practitioners today obsess with finding structural problems to account for back pain. This may result in part from today's powerful diagnostic technologies: If you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.|ret||ret||tab|

When X-rays diagnose skeletal abnormalities (which may or may not be the cause of pain), a recommendation of surgery will likely follow. Post-surgery activity restrictions then serve to create even more deconditioning. If the employee does not already practice good nutrition and healthy movement, recovery will be slow and fraught with additional problems. Not surprisingly, back pain continues.|ret||ret||tab|

Furthermore, the overuse of surgery goes hand in glove with the over prescription of pain medications. It's a vicious cycle.|ret||ret||tab|

Medications that impact internal organs (particularly the liver) also affect the lower back. The typical American liver already fights many environmental toxins, and medications only add to that organ's workload, which in turn can worsen lower back pain.|ret||ret||tab|

In addition to the harm caused by traditional treatments, some employee attitudes can also delay recovery.|ret||ret||tab|

(Editor's Note: This article is second in a four-part series focused on back pain and the workplace. The next article, focused on abnormal employee attitudes toward illness, will run in the Nov. 17 Workplace Design issue.)|ret||ret||tab|

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