Name: Treat Your Own Back
ISBN: 9780959774665

What Hacker News says

idle_processorJul 2023

Stuart McGill recommends periodically standing and stretching your arms over your head a couple times. You can see the motion demonstrated here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bcbuhePZZj0&t=459s

He also recommended doing the cat-cow from yoga, and there's a set of exercises referred to as the McGill big 3.

I've seen some positive references to the McKenzie method book, Treat Your Own Back. I haven't tried it specifically, but had good luck with their equivalent book for neck treatment.

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PaulHouleJan 2021

The most efficient kind of exercise to relieve low back pain involve bending backwards, such as the Cobra pose in Yoga

https://www.dummies.com/health/exercise/yoga/how-to-do-the-c...

Cobra and the exercises from that book are easy to do at home but I like the bioenergetic arch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=225tAQzCVhs

because it is standing and you can do it anywhere, just please wear better clothes than the guy in that video.

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GregDavidsonOct 2019

I recommend studying the short book "Treat Your Own Back" by Robin McKenzie and also finding a physical therapist familiar with his techniques. I was in similar distress and it was fairly quickly resolved by these techniques and I have also observed these techniques being effective for several other people. Physicians in the US are not trained in physical therapy yet physical therapists in the US are only allowed to apply physician-prescribed treatments! This can lead to some bizarre Catch-22 situations until you find a highly experienced physical therapist who can work with you. Checking if they use the "McKenzie methods" is a touchstone.

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wpietriMar 2019

Yeah, "clear physical mechanism" is a hole I could drive a truck through. Clear to whom? And what does "clear" have to do with "verified through rigorous scientific exploration of this and competing hypotheses"? As Mencken said, "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

My experience with most serious medical things is that doctors have a clear general-audience explanation, because part of their job is making patients feel like they understand what's going on. But if you get into the details, the good doctors will say, "Well, actually, the picture is much murkier, but here's what we know based on studies X, Y, and Z, but there's a lot yet to learn."

Back pain in particular is an area of open dispute. Many people have many theories, all of them very hard to test. When I was dealing with back pain, a spine-center doctor recommended a book called "Treat Your Own Back" [1]. It was hugely helpful to me. And in it, the doctor explains that he hit upon his method because a patient came in, used a piece of equipment that was set up totally the wrong way, and said, "Gosh, doc, that was great!" It led him to reexamine what he had been taught about backs, coming up with a different "clear physical mechanism" to explain a common class of pain.

That we are still figuring something out does not mean it's psychosomatic. It doesn't mean it's not, but a doctor suggesting otherwise is doing the medical equivalent of "god of the gaps" theology, where anything mysterious is attributed to your preferred cause.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Back-Robin-McKenzie/dp/095...

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icelancerJul 2017

Many will do McKenzie Method work ($10-15 book on Amazon, Treat Your Own Back) for lumbar pain in flexion. It is very specifically good for that and that alone, which is the most common form of low back pain. I found a lot of relief using the tools in the book (yoga-type postures) and weight lifting.

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ameliusJul 2017

I can warmly recommend this book for treating back pain and posture problems: [1].

[1] Robin A. McKenzie, "Treat Your Own Back".

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