How Back Pain Took Over The World
- By Mladenoff Clinic of AZ
- •
- 27 Apr, 2018
The biggest cause of disability around the world is surprisingly banal.
The rising importance of back pain as a cause of disability reveals two importantglobal trends: One, that we’ve gotten better at fighting the types of things that usedto really plague people, like measles (down 94 percent globally since 1990). Second, and relatedly, populations around the world are aging. And old peoples’ backs hurt.
But there are other factors that influence backaches, and those are all getting worse too. A high body-mass index and a lack of physical activity are both risk factors for back pain, and the same institute found a few years ago that obesity and overweight have increased by H28 percent in adults around the world since 1980. Trying to getobesity under control, Vos said, has been “spectacularly unsuccessful.”
It’s much the same story with back pain: We don’t really know what to do about it.There aren’t good treatments for it, Vos said, and some of the things that people useto try to manage it—like prescription opioids—have only morphed into health crises in their own right.
Link to full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/10/how-back-pain-took-over-the-world/503243/
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