A catalog of back pain resources.

Explore

In the wake of a back injury in the summer of 2019 and the exceptionally painful and lengthy recovery process that ensued, I found myself astonished by the difficulties faced by chronic pain sufferers looking for the right path forward. The principle takeaway from my experience has been that efforts to deal with chronic pain are often hindered considerably by a patient's reductive instincts. Here are some reductive mistakes I made when dealing with severe chronic back pain:

  • thinking that when I found the right practitioner they would fix me
  • feeling that my pain was due to me making some unknown subtle mistake
  • asking too many “why” questions

What I learned:

  • good practitioners are invaluable resources but they couldn’t fix me. The ideal relationship for me with a doctor turned out to feel much more like teacher / student than one in which the doctor is the mechanic and I’m the broken down vehicle. Working with a bad paradigm for what you want in a doctor makes it really hard to find (and listen to) a good one.
  • I may have made some missteps, but the path to managing chronic pain for me wasn’t one of discovering what I was doing wrong as much as it was one of learning new things I could do right and sharpening old skills, a process of 90% growth and 10% pruning rather than the other way around.
  • although I love to ask “why” questions, getting hung up on them as they relate to chronic pain was like tying a boat anchor around my neck: as long as I insisted they be answered in what I considered concrete terms before I moved forward, I simply wasn’t going anywhere. Worse yet, every time I felt confident I had found an answer to a “why”, it turned out to be a red herring. Because the mind is intrinsically involved in generating pain and determining how we experience it, the most useful answers to the “whys” of chronic back pain turn out to be conceptual constructs, unable to be viewed on an X-ray or MRI, attributed to any one circumstance, or remedied via any purely physical strategy of intervention.

These takeaways were the result of a lot of reading, an effort that I kept organized using Airtable and have left here mostly just in case I need it again. The pieces linked here are organized into the following categories:

  • Psychoeducational - materials that illuminate the nature of pain and how our thoughts can modulate our experience of it. Some pieces are specific to pain science and psychoeducational / cognitive based interventions, and others are more specifically focused on anatomy or back pain.
  • Exercise - general information on how to approach exercise in a way that works well in tandem with cognitive approaches to reduce rather than exacerbate pain.
  • Stories - narratives that knit all of these considerations together through the lens of someone's personal experience or investigations.
  • Survival Kit - assorted pain management strategies designed to take the edge off during the worst of times.

There are certainly other pieces which might be useful, such as research confirming that smoking has a deleterious effect on disc health, that nutrition can effectively reduce inflammation, or explanations of other potential causes of sciatic pain such as psoas or piriformis dysfunction. Similarly, for those with traumatic injuries and serious illness, interventions like surgery and pharmaceuticals may be of more immediate importance. However, for most chronic pain sufferers the most fruitful areas on which to direct focus are thought patterns and exercise, and the resources I've assembled here were primarily selected with that idea in mind. See the right hand sidebar to start browsing.

Explore
Updated November 16, 2023 at 2:41 AM
Copied 31 times

Alan Edwards

A guy exploring music, back pain, and life.
Explore the base
Psychoeducational
Exercise
Stories
Survival Kit
Grid view