The short answer is that back pain doesn’t come with age. Or rather that it doesn’t come BECAUSE of age. The AGE isn’t the issue.
As we get older things definitely seem to groan and creak a little more and we seek treatments for back pain, neck pain, hip, knee, shoulders, ankles, hands & feet. Unfortunately we are commonly told “It’s your age. It’s to be expected. You’ll just have to live with it”, and unfortunately it’s easy to believe that this is true.
It’s not true.
If it was just an issue of age then everyone of the same age would have more of the same problems, and they don’t! We see people in their 60’s and 70’s that are in incredible condition! And unfortunately people as young as their early 20's in very bad ways.
How many times have you heard someone say, "Oh, this is my bad knee and this is my good knee"? In clinic I hear it all the time! So I ask, "Why is this one so bad?" and the response is so often, "Oh, it's just arthritis. It's just my age. You can't do anything about it".
I typically have to fight a smile as my mind wants to say "Challenge accepted", but fortunately I'm able to change it by the time it reaches my mouth into, "So how old are you? How old is the bad knee? And how old is the good knee?". I have to confess, I LOVE that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed second of silence that ALWAYS follows where you can almost hear their brain thinking, "I don't know where to take this argument now...". It can be hard realising a long-held point of view was wrong, but then at least it creates an opportunity for the right way to be found.
So what is the right way? I've always liked this analogy. If two identical cars both come off the production line at the same time, they both have the same birthday. If one of them is bought by my grandma who uses it to do little else but pootle-off to church and the shop a few times per week, keeps it under cover and services it twice a year, but the other car is bought by my cousin, late teens, drives fast, likes late gear changes and even later braking, and doesn't bother servicing it... Both of those cars, when they reach one year old, will still be EXACTLY the same age, but in VERY different conditions. It's the same with you and me.
So, I hope that we can agree now that it's not really age that's the problem.
Which is great news!!
So why do we get pain as we get older?
We see patients of every age at the clinic, and I do mean EVERY age. From shouldn’t-have-been-born-yet, to... the far other end of the scale, and the vast majority of problems we see have a basis in how people have used their bodies day to day.
It’s how we use our bodies
The truth of the matter is that part of the reason we bounce back from things faster when we are younger is that we haven’t yet put our bodies through so much, yet. As time goes on we deplete our body’s reserve of adaptive capacity, it's ability to cope with everything that gets thrown at it.
Our system has a huge reserve when we are young, but after years of sitting at a desk, in the car, sofa, not enough of the right kind of activity, too much of the wrong kind of activity, poor diet choices and stress erodes those reserves.
For example, sometimes I may point to someone’s job as a potential factor only to be told, “But I’ve only had the pain a month and I’ve been doing that job for years!”. To me, that is exactly the point. At the beginning your body is able to cope because it was working well and had huge reserves of adaptive potential, but after years of repetition there may be certain areas that eventually start to run out and develop symptoms.
A useful analogy I heard for this is; your systems reserves of adaptive capacity is like an internal juggler. A juggler that juggles balls of stress. When we're young we have less balls and they're smaller, but we all know that over time life throws more balls and bigger balls at us. Also, we have to remember that not everybody's juggler is able to juggle the same amount of stress. But all of us can eventually reach a point where we can't cope with life throwing any more at us. We reach our limit and then any more stress, balls fall. I've heard a similar spinning plate analogy, but people find this one more memorable.
So once those reserves of adaptability have been spent, and we are juggling as many different stress balls as we can handle, is there a way back from that or is it gone forever?
Well, no matter our age, our body is in a perpetual state of change and it is up to us what those changes look like and whether they are positive or negative.
There’s Still Hope
The great news is that you can absolutely do things to improve and increase those reserves!
You also have to remember that if you carry on doing the same things, you will carry on getting the same results. But that does work both ways. If you stop doing things that make your body worse and start doing things that make it better CONSISTENTLY, then you will find that things consistently improve more and more!
A big part of my job is to help people identify the factors that they are doing that drive their issues, usually unwittingly, and to help them to make a course correction as quickly and as well as possible.
So much can be done with back pain treatment, and our goal at Health HQ is to have many tools in our arsenal to help calm down day-to-day symptoms, to help start to make areas work as well as possible, to prevent as much further deterioration as possible, support the body to help it repair as much as it can as time goes on and educate people and arm them with the tools they need to keep things working well, short-term, long-term and LIFE-term.
Time will pass regardless. How well you are working as that time passes depends on the actions you take NOW.
We see so many people who have been told that “It’s just arthritis” or that “nothing can be done” and we are able to help improve the quality of life for so many of them. Not because we can cure arthritis. We can't! But by investigating WHY that joint has stopped working right and started degenerating, and then improving the dysfunctional mechanics we almost invariably find around that area, we improve peoples quality of life. Because doing nothing will only let it get WORSE.
So, if you have ever been told, even by your own brain, that the pain you get is just your age, or that it is arthritis or that nothing can be done, create the opportunity for someone to prove you wrong, for someone to actually do something that might just help. If you are unsure get in contact or come for a Chiro Chat, so you can come to our clinic and speak to one of our clinical team for free to see if we could help discover the treatment for back pain, neck pain, hip, knee, shoulders, ankles, hands or feet to stop you feeling your age and go from old fart to young at heart!
If you do want some advice on what to do now about the pains that you get, have a look at our blog on Pain and our blog on how best to use Heat & Ice. People get heat and ice wrong ALL the time, so these two are definitely worth a watch.
And as a final farewell volley I will leave you with this; a video of amazing 92-year-old gymnast, Johanna Quaas. Please click here to watch.
Just saying.
