Back Pain

Back Pain: The Facts is aimed at people who want to help themselves. Affecting nearly everyong at some time in their lives, 40% of people will have experienced some form of back pain within the last year, with around 5% of sufferers taking time off from work within the last month. Long term back pain causes a great deal of distress and unhappiness, affecting work life, income, home life, relationships, fitness, and mood. Back Pain: The Facts uses clear succinct chapters to give advice about every aspect of managing back pain, as well as answering frequently asked questions from sufferers. A key element is empowerment through understanding why back pain starts and why it persists. There are chapters promoting stretching, exercise, relaxation, communication, advice on sexual relations, as well as considerable emphasis on helping with thoughts and feelings.

Dr John Lee has been a Consultant in Pain Medicine at UCL Hospitals since 2001. His specialist interest areas are back pain, development of services in primary care, and hospital management. He has developed outpatient care pathways to streamline treatment of patients with back pain, worked closely with his local PCTs to develop provision of multiprofessional services for patients with long term pain, been a Governor of his foundation trust, and worked on secondments for both the Healthcare Commission and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Suzanne Brook is an experienced Physiotherapist specialised in working with people who have chronic pain. She has worked in Hospitals, GP practices and private practice over the past 14 years within multi professional teams, including psychologists, doctors, nurses and occupational therapists. For the past 12 years Suzanne has been involved in the educating other physiotherapists and health care professionals in understanding the key to helping individuals manage their pain more successfully. She is especially interested in helping people with pain maintain their independence, return to or take up new hobbies and interests to help them maintain their fitness and confidence in exercising or participating in hobbies. Since qualifying as a clinical psychologist Clare Daniel has worked in chronic pain, audiology, women's health and HIV/AIDS services. The emphasis of her work is to help people reduce the psychological and physical impact of long term health problems. She is now the clinical lead of the UCLH COPE Pain Management Programme and is involved in teaching and training trainee clinical psychologists, physiotherapists and other health care providers. In addition to her doctorate in clinical psychology, Clare has completed the Oxford Diploma in Cognitive Therapy and the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy Practitioners Training (University of Bangor). She also has an interest in chronic pain research and was a research associate at Imperial College London for three years. Clare has written chapters on cognitive behavioural interventions for long term health problems and has presented much of her work at national and international conferences.

Section 1 - Understanding back pain1. How is the back constructed?2. What is back pain?3. Scans, x-rays and that word 'degenerating'4. How did the pain get to take over my life?Section 2 - Medical treatments5. What different types of professionals could help?6. Can my back pain be cured by injections or surgery?7. Can I take medications for my pain?Section 3 - Self treatments8. Thoughts and feelings9. Communication10. Relaxation11. What is the role of exercise and movement?12. How much activity can I do?13. Specific stretches and exercisesSection 4 - Bringing things together: real patients' tales14. Coping with a new pain: what can I expect from treatments?15. Making sense of scan results and finding a cure16. Home life is difficult17. Nights are the worst time18. My pain has got a whole lot worseInternet resources