Keep the Back Pain Away

Simple things can work wonders when it comes to keeping your spine healthy. This is called preventative maintenance, and its equivalent is an old saying you may have heard: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

1. Develop Body Awareness
The body is an interrelated machine - an aberration in one part will diminish function in other areas. (This is called the kinetic chain.) Postural alignment is the science of how the parts of the body relate to the whole form. When it is ideal, bones are centered and balanced with respect to one another, freeing muscles from spasm, and allowing them to do their job of moving the body.

Take note of how the muscles, bones and joints feel in response to various activities. Does sitting cause your back to feel differently than walking? How do your muscles feel when you wake up in the morning? Answering questions such as these will help you trace the effects of your movements on your back, allowing you to make efficient movement choices.

2. Strengthen Your Core

The abdominal and back muscles work together to hold the trunk upright. The action of these muscle groups balance one another to support this area. Weak or tight torso muscles, along with any strength imbalances between them, can be the precursor to back injuries. Core strengthening programs, such as Pilates, yoga, and water exercise (to name just a few) are excellent ways to build up your trunk muscles.


3. Use Your Body Well

If you are like most people, you perform certain activites many times during the course of the day. But have you stopped to consider whether you are doing them in a mechanically efficient way? Over time, most routine daily activites become a matter of habit. If you repeatedly do chores from non-neutral positions, that is, you use muscles when bones could do a better job, you may be setting yourself up for injury and/or back strain.

Learning and practicing proper body mechanics is often a matter of unlearning ways of doing things to which you are accustomed, but that may also be stressful to your joints. This is especially true when lifting heavy objects or reaching for something.


4. Be Active and Exercise

Research has shown there are many kinds of activities that help decrease and/or prevent back pain. Exercise builds muscle tone and increases flexibility. It is quite often a component of rehab programs given by physical therapists and back specialists.

Doing back exercises, along with making an effort to sensibly increase your activity levels can help you prevent or manage your back pain. Of course, you should ask your doctor first, to be sure you do not run the risk of making injuries or condition-specific matters worse.

Preventative maintenance means not only doing your back exercises, but also taking frequent breaks from the computer or desk, stretching, walking more (even when you don't have to), and other activities.

5. Breathe

Did you know that the same muscles that enable you to breathe also function as posture muscles? Breathing exercises taken from martial arts, yoga, Pilates and singing technique can all be of value in developing a strong core and a healthy postural alignment. Core muscles are responsible for good posture. If your spinal bones are aligned, and your trunk muscles are flexible and strong, your posture will easily hold upright against gravity, and enable you to perform movements fluidly.

6. Maintain a Healthy Weight

A healthy back is the working combination of nerves, muscles, bones and more. But being overweight puts pressure on these structures. If you maintain a healthy weight for your height, you decrease your risk of back pain. Research has linked overweight with an increased risk of disk and other back problems.

New Anti-Psychotic Drugs work better than Old

A new study has shown that people diagnosed with their first episode of schizophrenia fare much better when treated with newer anti-psychotic drugs than with traditional medications. The double bind study was conducted in China by American and Chinese scientists. It is the first study to directly compare treatment with clozapine (Clozaril), an 'atypical' anti-psychotic medication, with chlorpromazine (Thorazine) in people who had an episode of schizophrenia for the first time.

200 patients diagnosed with first-episode schizophrenia were randomized to receive one drug or the other. Neither they nor the scientists knew who received which drug until all the data had been collected. The findings strongly suggest that clozapine works better than chlorpromazine in early schizophrenia.

The findings of this study were presented December 11, 2000 to the 39th Annual Meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D. of the University of North Carolina summarized the study this way: "We found that clozapine acts faster and produced fewer patients who drop out or stop treatment because of side effects. This is the first time a study's ever been done comparing the prototype of this new class of drugs with the old group in a large sample of patients."

Clozapine is the second most widely used medication for schizophrenia in China, but its use is restricted in the United States. The FDA approved clozapine as a 2nd- or 3rd-line of treatment for people who were unresponsive to other medications because early studies showed it suppressed the immune system's white cells in one percent of people who took it for more than six weeks . The authors conducted the study in China where these restrictions do not exist.

Based on the study's results Lieberman sees a wider role for the newer medications. "We think using these new drugs as first-line medications increases the likelihood of recovering from the illness and reduces the likelihood of a second episode when they remain in treatment. Patients who are at the beginning of their illness are extremely sensitive to treatment. That sensitivity makes them very responsive to the therapeutic effects of anti-psychotic drugs. They respond to all treatment including the newer and better treatments. However, they're also more sensitive to side effects and this can become a real problem in terms of their willingness to continue their medication and the likelihood of them stopping."

In a footnote, the study also found that patients in the study whose blood tests showed signs of exposure to the parasite toxoplasmosis had a poor response to treatment. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite borne by cats and some other domestic animals. Lieberman speculated on this result: "There's a theory that an infectious agent, a parasite or some other microorganism, can cause schizophrenia - and toxoplasmosis has an affinity for the nervous system, where it can lie dormant for a long time in its migration to the brain." Lieberman suggested that schizophrenic patients in a population with a high risk for toxoplasmosis should be given standard anti-psychotic medication along with one of the drugs typically used against the parasite.

Clozapine was the very first of the new 'atypical antipsychotic' medications. Other medications in this class seem to have some of the benefits without the infrequent dangerous side-effect. This study suggests that physicians should at least consider a medication in this class for patients newly diagnosed with schizophrenia. Is there still a role for older anti-psychotics? Maybe - but their role continues to shrink.

Has Dramatic Effect on Phobias?

A tuberculosis medication is currently in Phase II clinical trials for phobia treatment. Years of preliminary research have demonstrated that the medication D-cycloserine, marketed as a tuberculosis medication under the brand name Seromycin, can boost the effectiveness of therapy in treating a variety of simple phobias.

The medication appears to work by affecting the NMDA receptors in the amygdala portion of the brain, although it is not yet clear if this is its only effect. It does not directly treat the phobia. Instead, the drug appears to stimulate the area of the brain that is responsible for unlearning fear responses.

Repeated clinical trials have demonstrated that patients with acrophobia (fear of heights) respond much more quickly to traditional therapy than patients who take a placebo. Clinical trials are now ongoing to explore the medication’s effects on other phobias, as well as other anxiety disorders.

Although it is too early to make a definite call, all signs indicate that D-cycloserine may be both safe and effective as an adjunct to therapy in patients with phobias.