Posturally! Your Online Creative Body Therapist

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.

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If you are going to be proactive about getting and staying comfortable, you most likely need an expert to help you. A workplace study, published in the October 2009 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and involving about 1500 people, found that just buying an ergonomic desk set up isn’t enough to address the posture related pain due to work positions.

Non-Neutral Work Positions can Cause Muscle Tension and Pain.

Work related pain often comes from holding yourself in what ergonomists call non-neutral positions. These positions are ones in which the joints are not centered, i.e., the two bones that make up a joint are not aligned with one another. The fit just isn’t right. This reduces how much support you can get for the position you are in. Non-neutral positions create a tremendous amount of tension (and pain!) in the body, because the muscles become like bones in order to scaffold the joint’s position.

After 18 months, improvement was seen in those who not only received new desks and chairs, but also received the benefit of professional help in setting them up. These workers had less muscuolskeletal pain and less eyestrain than the comparison group. Results from this study apply only to workers who began the study with pain. Those who started pain free didn’t seem to benefit from the ergonomic perks provided by the study.

“Just providing new office furniture and written instructions is not sufficient to achieve proper accommodation,” the authors conclude. “Good office equipment is a poor substitute for good working positions.”

Sources:
Laestadius, Jasminka Goldoni; Ye, Jian; Cai, Xiaodong; Ross, Sandra; Dimberg, Lennart; Klekner, Meg.
The Proactive Approach-Is It Worthwhile? A Prospective Controlled Ergonomic Intervention Study in Office Workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 51(10):1116-1124, October 2009. Date Accessed. Jan 12 10. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0b013e3181bae19d.

Newswise. Press Release. The Proactive Approach-Is It Worthwhile? A Prospective Controlled Ergonomic Intervention Study in Office Workers. Oct 21 09. Date Accessed. Jan 12 10. http://newswise.com/articles/proactive-approach-to-ergonomics-reduces-pain-in-office-workers.