Understanding Your Back Pain

Lower Back Pain: Emma Soames tells how she has at last found someone who understands her back.

© Published in SAGA members magazine.

Helpful Reviews of ‘Back Sufferer’s Bible’
by Sarah Key

As life proceeds many of us become members of clubs we would rather not join. I have had my name put down for a couple over the past few years, but the one to which I have been paying a daily direct debit over recent years is lower back pain.

Of all the conditions that can dog one’s life, back pain is one of the less severe. It makes life difficult at times and gloomy at others, but it won’t kill you. I have full mobility, it doesn’t show (except, I fear, on my face) and I hang on to a theory that if I can turn myself from servant to master in this relationship it will get fed up with me and go away.

But above all, why in an age of incredible diagnostic tools, epidurals, Pilates, chiropractic and even extraordinary surgery, can no one apparently offer a cure for chronic lower back pain? There are 2.5 million people who suffer daily from back pain which costs the NHS £481 million a year in treatment – and that is before the invisible costs of broken lives and lost days at work are factored in.

My adventures in the back trade have taken me from the operating table to many physiotherapists, one cranial osteopath, several chiropractors, an acupuncturist and a gym that specializes in back conditions.

I have drawn the line at a healer (well, you must keep something up your sleeve) but I have tried Pilates, yoga, and different kinds of pain management. My house is full of cushions, bed boards and strangely shaped pillows that are supposed to improve matters. And still I live with this pain.

When it comes to my health I am a great believer in the instant fix, which is why I ended up on an operating table only three months after the pain began. A herniated disc was diagnosed, I was referred to a surgeon who told me I either had to live with the condition or he could operate and get a good result. So – without a second opinion – I blocked out my diary for a few weeks and got it fixed. Or so I thought.

In the months after the operation, which was deemed to be a success by the surgeon however many times I went back to him singing psalms of dissatisfaction, the pain changed shape and location and moved in as a resident squatter. I have had many “second” opinions from grand men in Harley Street – the last of whom told me there was nothing wrong even while I lay on the floor of his office as my back was hurting too much to sit.

I have had an epidural and some pain injections but they don’t seem to work at all. Despite repeated scans and X-rays, no one has ever given a name to this unwanted squatter in my lower back: “non-specific chronic back pain” is as articulate a diagnosis as I managed to get.

See Helpful Reviews of ‘Back Sufferer’s Bible’ by Sarah Key

Finally, six months ago, in a state of growing acceptance that this was just something I would have to learn to live with, I was bullied by friends to see Sarah Key, who is regarded by many people with bad backs as a High Priestess of Physiotherapy. She lives in Australia for much of the time, so she isn’t the easiest person to get an appointment with.

At my first session with her, when I ran through my symptoms and the litany of failed interventions, she told me what was wrong with me – Facet Joint Arthropathy – and that it was curable. She put me down on the floor on my stomach and used her hands and feet to probe my lower back. She instantly put her foot on a small area at the bottom from whence – or so it felt at that moment – all the pain was sited. She then began digging around like an archaeologist who smells gold.

I bought her book, The Back Sufferer’s Bible, and there, bingo, was an entire chapter on this condition, complete with clear explanations of treatment, equally clear drawings of exercises to alleviate pain as well as detailed explanations of how the back functions and how these conditions arise. For the first time I felt I had found someone who has a real understanding of backs, how they work and, more importantly, how over a period of years the hurly-burly of life can upset the delicate balance of a healthy spine.

For my back, and for many other people with similar problems, Key uses the analogy of a car tyre when describing the problems of the lower back. “Our discs are full of liquid which when removed or evaporated means the disc is running on empty – on the rim. The trick is to refill the disc just like putting air back in a tyre. And it can be done.” Articulate and passionate, she has become best known for her hands on technique, manipulating backs with her feet and digging into stubborn tissues that have become obdurate after years of stiffness, bad posture and abuse. She is a good communicator, a fine teacher and a fervent believer that if you give us the information and understanding about what is wrong, we can largely solve our own problems.

`Lazy people make better patients, as active people try to do too much’

I next saw her at the Back in A Week programme she runs twice a year at Tresanton, a luxurious hotel in Cornwall. This immersion course – be warned it is expensive – left me and 10 other fellow sufferers a great deal better informed about our backs. And after a week of doing exercises under her supervision combined with daily physiotherapy,I began to get some relief.

The exercises she prescribes are extremely gentle, decompressing and comforting to inflamed, complaining backs and limbs: for backs the only accessory she prescribes apart from a mat is a wooden “brick”, which actively stretches the spine and lets the air back in the tyres, as you lie on it. “I’m pretty much a cave woman, very low tech” is how she describes her approach. “I use my feet, my hands and a block of wood. I work like a piano tuner.” We all learn to “listen” to our backs and to allow our spines to guide the treatment. But perseverance is key – for most patients there is no quick fix. The exercises are done two or three times a day and progress can be painfully slow. Key tells her patients – many of whom have suffered for many years – “It’s like climbing out of a very deep hole and you will have slip backs. It’s important to keep going but also not to do too much. Lazy people make better patients as active people try to do too much too soon. You just can’t hurry it.”

The problem with Sarah Key’s innovative treatment is that there is only one of her and she spends most of her time in Australia. However, under the umbrella of the Prince of Wales’s Integrated Health Foundation, she has held seminars to pass on her skills to British physiotherapists, so gradually her methods will become more widely available – and goodness knows they are needed by millions of people.

However, her exercises are now available to readers of her released books explaining and including different exercises that cover most of the vulnerable areas of the body relating to back pain. As for myself, I cannot tell you that I am now pain-free. But what I do have is a sense of hope, that I am on the right track and that I am slowly making progress towards getting an eviction order for the uninvited pain in my life.

Sarah Keys Back Sufferers Bible

Helpful Reviews of ‘Back Sufferer’s Bible’
by Sarah Key