Breakthrough For Back Pain Article 2 of 4 by William V. Zucker, Ph.D. with Brian W. Nelson, M.D.

In the last article, I discussed briefly how ineffective typical floor exercises are for healing the painful low back. This time, I will discuss what the breakthrough is all about.

The root cause of low-back pain is weak musculature.

The breakthrough in healing the painful low back came when University of Florida researchers proved that on average most of us, even those of us without any significant low-back pain, were walking around with our low-back lumbar spine muscles in a state of chronic atrophy. This simply means that our lumbar muscles are typically in a weakened state. When the researchers then looked at low-back-pain patients, their lumbar muscles were even weaker than the low-back muscles of people with no pain. They identified these weak muscles as the root cause, the weak link, of low-back pain.

Now there's a special piece of equipment to exercise those weak lumbar muscles.

A special piece of equipment was developed by the MedX Corporation (Ocala, Florida) which for the first time permits effective exercise to be applied to the low back. This is how it works

The low-back muscles have to he isolated for effective exercising.

In normal back movement, the thigh and buttock muscles tilt the pelvis, and that moves the back the low back muscles do very little work. Isolation of the low back requires that the powerful thigh and buttocks muscles be prevented from assisting the low back in movement. Look at the diagram of the specially designed exercise chair. In exercising, you move your torso forward into the flexed position, and you move back into the extended position The features to notice are: (1) the foot board which cranks you backward in the chair; (2) the knee restraint, which provides the correct angular relationship between your thighs, knees, and legs and (3) the thigh restraint, which provides a means for correct distribution of forces on the pelvis. Working together, these special features completely eliminate pelvic movement.

The force imposed against the bottom of the movable foot board translates into a system for pushing the femur (the thigh bone) into the pelvis, like a brace, in a manner that completely prevents pelvic rotation towards the rear. This special system for "locking in" the pelvis during back and forth exercise movements is illustrated in the second figure. This specially-designed chair- it's called the MedX Lumbar Extension Machine- specifically exercises the low-back muscles in isolation, and throughout the exercise, the pelvis is immobilized.

Your health-care provider administers this effective therapy.

Doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, exercise physiologists, and surgeons have been using this system for low-back therapy for almost seven years with phenomenal results

Thousands of patients are being healed all the time.

At a recent symposium in Orlando, Florida, sponsored by the University of Florida, Center for Exercise Science (Exercise Rehabilitation of the Spine: Update '93), Brian Nelson, MD., discussed and summarized his experience with the MedX system.

In a study stretching over two years, Dr. Nelson reported on a group of 1,339 patients, which included a follow-up 13 months after they had completed the initial treatment for low-back pain.

On average, men and women increased their low back muscle strength by 45 percent. Accompanying this increased low-back strength, 64 percent of the patients reported that all their pain was gone or was greatly decreased, while 15 percent reported significant improvement. Twelve percent reported no change, and only 3 percent said their pain was worse.

You are either pain-free or have greatly reduced pain even after the initial treatment.

On follow-up after 13 months, 94 percent of those patients who reported excellent to good results (no pain to significant improvement) maintained this improvement. (We'll talk about your responsibility for maintaining this strength in the next article) Dr. Nelson also showed that of the one in six patients who were considering surgery before entering the program, full 71 percent stated that results from MedX treatment convinced them that surgery was not necessary.

Results like these have never been achieved before in routine treatment of low-back pain. They are a true breakthrough.

What's coming?

In the next article, I'll tell you the details about the treatment-more about how it is done, how long it takes per session, the average time for full treatment, how much it costs, and how to maintain your new low-back strength.