iirc there are no scientific studies that have shown a link between posture and back pain, and some evidence that what is usually considered “good posture” can cause it, esp. if it’s forced. “good posture” as a concept originates in weird victorian pseudoscience. unless you’re doing something that actually causes pain in the moment or have, like, an injury that shows up on X ray, you’re probably not giving yourself back problems.
Whoa! Important if true. Do you have any recommended reading on this? As someone with terrible posture, a bad ergonomic environment, and occasional back pain, this is Relevant To My Interests.
these are among the sources cited by aaron_kubaldc, a guy on tiktok (yeah, yeah, I know, but he cites his sources!) who talks more generally about why chiropractic stuff is bullshit & how to approach issues like back pain from a more evidence-based direction
what is good seems to be (basically) not sitting in ways which are deliberately uncomfortable (for instance, because you’re trying not to “have bad posture”), to move or shift position when you feel uncomfortable (i.e., what people tend to do anyway), and stay the fuck away from chiropractors, who are at best useless quacks
pain is complicated and has lots of difficult-to-disentangle physiological and psychological feedback loops, so it’s easy to convince people through the magic of confirmation bias that any pain they have is because of posture. it doesn’t hurt that by the basically random criteria we have for “good posture,” tons of people have bad posture. but the human spine and back is pretty resilient, and you can’t give yourself a debilitating injury just from how you sit. sitting too much doesn’t increase back pain, and looking at your phone too much won’t fuck up your neck.
I would like to disagree strongly but qualifiedidly about chiropractors. I have seen multiple ones who are, at best, quacks. I’ve also seen ones who have fixed problems that had been building for years with no other treatment helping (including a great deal of ‘science-based’ physical therapy). Sometimes your problem is that the joint is twisted the fuck out of alignment and it’s making absolutely everything around it worse.
I know that I can see a physical therapist weekly, do half hour or more physical therapy each night (for my legs, knees, and lower back), take my usual meds plus a higher dose of ibuprophen, and then use a heating pad, ice pack, or both to get my back to chill out enough to let me sleep.
Or I can see a (good) chiropractor every couple weeks to get my pelvis aligned correctly and all the other issues basically go away.
The stuff about “popping the back” is generally nonsense, though.
this response surprises me. i thought most people understood chiropractors as belonging to the same general class as homeopaths, reiki healers, and acupuncturists, i.e., if you don’t trust someone to cure your arthritis by moving their hands around in the air over you you’re not gonna trust a chiropractor. like obviously if you feel you’re getting value for money you’re not literally getting scammed, but the evidence for chiropractors doing anything useful is bad, and the evidence they can actually cause some kind of long-term effect on the spine or on joints by briefly messing with them is, as far as i can tell, totally nonexistent
My mother went to a chiropractor for a while – for scoliosis, which is, everyone agrees, an issue of spinal misalignment – and seemed to have no expectation of a cure but found him as the point guy for dealing with it – which included, like, recommendations of vitamins from the health food store, I kinda get the sense he was a guru of what 70s-80s “alternative medicine” had to offer that wasn’t pure woo
