Back-pain help for workers is urged in the UK

10 million working days lost each year + £7 Billion cost to society = SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

Musculoskeletal disorders cost society billions a year prompting the UK Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance to finally tackle the ever-present issue hands on and urge employers to do more. They are recommending that managers should create more flexible working conditions and substantially focus on what their employees can do rather than what they cannot. Everyone has value to bring to the table, and just because someone can’t sit at their office desk doesn’t mean they can’t do their job or utilize their skills for another, more appropriate task. This is especially true given today’s web-enabled communication technologies like e-mail, chat, voice and video conferencing that easily enable those with a sudden or severe physical limitation to contribute without being physically present at the office.

The UK alliance is also advocating the adoption of preventative measures in the workplace and extra training for early intervention – key to avoiding more serious injuries that can put employees out of work for months (and you’ve probably noticed that prevention and early intervention is something we care about a lot here at BeltLife).

via BBC

Open Source Health Research – CureTogether.com

Making better health decisions has never been easier thanks to the wealth of knowledge out there on the Internet. However, filtering through all that information and determining the reliability of sources and recommendations is often a daunting task that leads to hours of comparing pros and cons — which is why it was so exciting to stumble upon CureTogether, where knowledge truly is power.

A very cool open-source health research site, CureTogether empowers patients by creating a place for people to anonymously come together to self-report symptoms and treatments that have or haven’t worked for them, with the goal of helping others make more informed treatment decisions and contribute data to research. And if your condition isn’t listed, you can simply write in a request to add it to ongoing studies. Straightforward and informative, all you need to do to get started is search for a particular condition or ailment bothering you. Then, you can immediately review the most common symptoms, causes, treatments and related conditions and see how all of these apply to you. It’s about time we were connecting and collaborating about health as we do about so much else, so this is a great step on the web for taking personal health into our own hands and improving our quality of life.

Here’s what a quick search for back pain has produced:

Back Pain Symptoms

Notice that stretching, hot packs and exercise are reported as the three most effective treatments and nine out of ten are non-pharmacological, natural solutions.

Back Pain Treatments

Back Pain Causes

UK medical journal reports troops most vulnerable to back pain

An interesting study published in the UK journal, the Lancet, one of the world’s leading general medical journals, has found that “back, joint and muscle pain were the leading medical problems suffered by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for almost one-quarter of all injuries.”

Of course, with the extremely heavy loads troops endure on their back for long periods of time and the wide-ranging, high-stress conditions they undergo that end up straining their back muscles, this news comes as no surprise. The analysis, carried out by researchers at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, has also revealed that of the injuries requiring soldiers to be withdrawn from the battlefield, only 14% percent were due to combat wounds. Sounds like proper training for lifting and carrying heavy weights, preventative measures and possible ergonomic military gear is in order…

via BBC

Smokers at higher risk for low back pain

According to recent findings unveiled by Finnish researchers in the American Journal of Medicine, “there is new data suggesting a modest association between smoking and risk of low back pain, with the strongest association for chronic or disabling low back pain”.

Though not proof nor a direct cause and effect relationship, one of the factors that scientists believe could explain this correlation includes reduced blood supply to the spine. This could certainly have merit – one of the reasons we actually feel back pain when we strain or stress our backs in the first place is due to restricted blood circulation to the spine; consequently, one of the most effective ways to ease back pain has become heat therapy which helps increase blood flow to the spine. The other cited explanations for the correlation include “increased risk of osteoporosis and the increased circulation of pain conducting chemicals in the blood from smoking”. On a positive note, the research does suggest the effects of smoking could be at least partially reversible for former smokers.

via Reuters