Back pains are a norm in modern society. Statistically speaking, it was discovered that nearly half of Americans who are working have instances of back pains each year. Furthermore, one third of the elderly population has severe back and neck pains. This is a painful condition to live with. It will hinder you from most of the activities that you can do. If you resort to numb the pain by the use of pain killers, then you are into more health complications.
But what you should wonder is: why were the indigenous communities living lives free of back pains despite the hard work they do?
Most of these communities do back-breaking chores with their bodies and have totally healthy backs. Esther Gokhale, who is an acupuncturist from Palo Alto, California, travelled round the world into the untouched habitats of these indigenous communities and found out why.
She noticed there was a major difference between how people of this communities walked, sat and stood and how we did. Even the elderly could do chores bending for up to 9 hours without any problem. The most mind blowing discovery was that their spine was J-shaped, which was different from the normal S-shaped spine.
So Gokhale took the challenge of turning her spine into a J-shape. With a lot of struggle and hard work, she managed and all her back pain was gone. She claimed that doing this was really tough.
Dr. Praveen Mummaneni from University of California tries to explain why we have differently shaped backs associating it with our way of life. Our way of life leads to lack of muscle tone and a lack of postural stability resulting to weak core muscles. To shape your spine to a J-shape you need to exercise and build up your core muscle strength.
