Upper Back Pain?

How often does your upper back or your mid back hurt? If you’re like me and probably millions of your fellow humans, the answer is something along the lines of “often”. Mid and upper back pain is one of those things that seems to elude the “people in the know”, ie medical researchers and conventional physicians. They’ve done some studies on it but not nearly as many as for neck pain or lower back pain. Yet, one of the few things they do know about thoracic spine pain is that it’s about as common as lower back pain, which affects 80% of people at some point in their lives. It is also just as troubling.

My take on this dearth of information on upper-mid back pain is that it will be a while before there will be evidence based treatments for thoracic spine pain. So we non-medical people are left to our own devices to deal with it.

Let’s sus this thing out to try to determine the best course of action for what they call “non-specific” upper and mid back pain. Non-specific back pain is the type that’s not connected to a disease or injury that can be directly correlated with the pain. It’s the everyday, muscle and posture pain, generally speaking. What do we know about thoracic spine pain?

First a definition. Thoracic spine pain is pain (and related symptoms) felt in the area between the 1st thoracic vertebra and the 12th (T1 – T12). T1 to T12 is that area of your back that corresponds to the vertical span of your ribs. Now one of the problems with medical studies is they all define “thoracic” a little differently. This skews the data. Data is the traffic cop of medical treatments – no data – no medical treatment. I exaggerate, but it does go along those lines. And that’s why it’s important to know about the data that is out there. Every little bit helps the self-educating consumer.

• Thoracic spine pain, and this what comes to my mind only, is like a mini-epidemic in the world of work. About 30% of the working stiff population – office workers, manual laborers and the like have thoracic spine pain. I can hear all about that when I get my hair done. But I like listening to people talk about their back pain. I know, I’m different.
• Kids get thoracic pain, and yes, it can be related to growth. By the time a child reaches 18, they may have just as much pain as we adults.
• Smoking ups the probability of getting thoracic spine pain.

So already we know that it’s out there more than the doctors can acknowledge when determining treatment, that we need to dialogue with our kids about their pain (and listen to them!) and we need to quit smoking – for our own good.

I’m going to be covering the topic of upper back and mid back pain in installments, so that I can really peruse the research that is out there, and interpret for us self-empowering and holistic types. So, I’ll be back and I hope you will, too.

Sources:
Jeffries LJ, Milanese SF, Grimmer-Somers KA.Epidemiology of adolescent spinal pain: a systematic overview of the research literature. Spine (Phila Pa 1976). 2007 Nov 1;32(23):2630-7.
Briggs, A. et. al. Prevalence and Associated Factors for Thoracic Spine Pain in the Adult Working Population: A Literature Review. J Occup Health 2009.