Published: April 29, 2009 01:47 am      

Got a bad back?

Some ways to deal with the problem

FAIRMONT — Don Rose knows how to properly lift a box. It was the turning that got him in trouble.

“I lifted the right way, but I turned the wrong way,” said the Core resident, who hurt his back at his job as a coal miner lifting a 40-pound bag of rock dust. “When I turned to set it down, I didn’t move my feet. I just twisted my back.”

The incident occurred in early December and it took Rose an hour just to get outside to go to his car and drive to the hospital.

Injuring the back while lifting and turning is a common one, said Derek Falkenstein, owner of Country Roads Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation, who said that about 80 to 90 percent of lifting accidents occur when the person also twists.

“Most of them have a rotational component with it,” Falkenstein said. “It’s almost universal. You definitely want to avoid twisting and lifting.”

After doctors could not solve his problem, Rose sought treatment from Joe Pennington, a physical therapist at Fairmont Rehabilitation Center at the Fairmont General Hospital HealthPlex.

Both Falkenstein and Pennington recommend core strengthening as a way to help avoid future back problems. That basically means exercising the middle parts of the body — the lower back, the abdominals and buttocks.

“Strengthening the core can be something as easy as a pelvic tilt — that’s lying on your back and pressing against the ground — by tightening the abdominal muscles,” Pennington said,

Pennington and other Fairmont Rehab Center staff members have patients do pelvic tilts in combination with different leg movements to add resistance.

“And then there are abdominal curls — lying on your back and getting into the pelvic tilt position, crossing your arms and lifting your shoulders off the ground,” Pennington said. “You don’t want to bend at the neck. You’re lifting your shoulders off the ground to allow your abdominal muscles to contract.”

Both Falkenstein and Pennington agree that full-blown sit-ups can be hard on the back.

Another exercise to increase core strength are the ones that test the lumbar extensor muscles. “To do that, we usually have people lying on their stomach doing prone leg lifts and then prone arm and leg lifts,” Pennington said.

In addition to core strengthening, another key component to good back health is flexibility, Falkenstein said. And, perhaps somewhat ironically, the most important muscle to keep flexible is the hamstring on the back of the thigh, not one in the back.

“The biggest thing, if we could tell people what to do, is hamstring flexibility,” Falkenstein said. “That muscle has a lot to do with overall back health. The more flexible you are at the hamstring, the less stress there is that gets passed up through the lower extremities to the lower back.”

Ruth Ashcraft of Fairmont can attest to the power of exercise in helping with back problems. When she first went to see Falkenstein, she needed to use a cane to walk because of a disc that was deteriorating, causing a bone to sit on the sciatic nerve.

“It was numbing my leg so I could hardly walk,” Ashcraft said. “We did different kinds of exercises. We did them there and we did them at home. He helped me walk without the cane.”

Ashcraft attended physical therapy for about four months. “It took time to get back to where it needed to be,” she said. “Ever since then, I haven’t had any problems at all.”

Both Ashcraft and Rose continue to do their back exercises at home in order to keep up their core strength to help them avoid future back problems.

Rose does his exercises every other day for about a half an hour, while Ashcraft performs hers about three times a week.

The physical therapy and exercises have helped Rose to return to about 90 percent of his ability prior to his accident, he said. For Ashcraft, it has made all the difference in the world.

“When I started, he would ask me what my pain was, and I would say, ‘A 10-plus,’” Ashcraft said. “Sometimes I would sit and cry. Now I can play with my grandchildren and lift them up. Not the 11- and 7-year-olds, but the 3- and 4-year-olds. I get on the floor and play with them and wrestle with them and it doesn’t bother my back.”

E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.