Myths about Back pain and its management !

During my career as a spine surgeon, i have come across many myths prevailing in community about back pain and spine care... i don;t know who and how many will be reading this blog, but its my humble attempt to let the public know about back and its cry of pain ! I will try to put on this blog details about back and its disease in a scientific format for everyone to understand. I want to take head-on each and every myths prevailing in our country. But first thing comes first... before we can shatter a myth , we need to understand what actually is our back. so today i put forward a brief about human back.

What is Back?

In a broad term , back means entire back from base of the head to the buttock. Back in a medical term is a composite of vertebral column , muscles around back and overlying skin and soft tissue. It doesn't need a rocket scientist to make you understand that any disease or a problem in any of these structures will lead to BACK PAIN.

vertebral column is composed of cervical column ( in neck ), thoracic column ( in chest or mid part of back ) , lumbar column ( low back ) and sacrococcygeal column ( tail bone column).

vertebral column is a tower made up of block like bone pieces with adjoining cushions called disc. see image below.

Block of bone provides structural support and at the same time maintains the shape of human back . The intervening disc provides a delicate balance of support and mobility of back.

Vertebral column is divided into cervical ( made up of 7 vertebrae ) thoracic ( 12 vertebrae ) , lumbar ( 5 vertebrae ) and saccrococcygeal ( 5 fused vertebrae made sacrum and another 3 to 4 makes up for coccyx bone).

On top of this tower our head sits and at the tail end we sit !!!!!

we shall discuss regarding muscles in the next post soon.... we shall also elaborate different region in more detail in next spot.