The mysterious and puzzling recurrence of back pain throughout society, which no one has been able to identify a cause of nor prescribe a cure, can be explained as a virus.
I have no basis for this assertion, nor do I have training in medicine or anything related to medicine or science. (I do hold several advanced degrees in fiction-writing, however.) It seems to me that an undetectable virus makes sense: back pain pops up, frequently without a triggering event, lasts for a while, a week or two, does not respond to treatment (antibiotics, bed rest, dietary changes, chiropractic treatment, etc.), and disappears suddenly. Sounds like a virus to me.
Can you explain to me the implausibility of my theory? Can viruses be ruled out as a cause of back pain?
Since you apparently have stats to hand on this “mysterious and puzzling recurrence of back pain throughout society”, then presumably you can tell us something about how it has spread geographically. Did it show up in one region first, and spread from there, with occasional new cases arising and spreading in and from major cities?
And, of course, have you controlled for the average population age? Most likely, an increase in back pain now just means an increase in people of the age who get back pain.
My own experience, and that of those I’ve spoken to, really doesn’t correlate back pain with age at all. I did VERY strenuous stuff in my teens and twenties, didn’t have much back pain at all, then in my late thirties I had several episodes of crippling, debilitating back pain, when I’d pretty stopped the strenuous things of my youth. In the last few years in my fifties and sixties, when I’ve stopped strenuous stuff almost completely, I’ve had none. This is what most of my friends describe as well.
Good point about the geographic spread. Maybe low transmission rates? Maybe it stays dormant somehow?
Assuming for the sake of the argument that a virus is responsible, it would be one that is endemic. Thus, talking about geographic patterns of spread doesn’t really apply.
Having studied infectious disease along with epidemiology AND both chronic and acute back pain, and having treated both infections and back pain for over 4 decades, I am here to say that the OP’s hypothesis is unlikely in the extreme.
That’s not to say that infections can’t cause back pain. Certainly infectious etiologies like osteomyelitis, septic discitis, paraspinous and epidural abscesses are all well known causes of back pain. As are visceral/pelvic diseases like kidney infections, gallbladder infections, PID, prostatitis etc. Infections are just an incredibly small percentage of the causes of back pain.
By far the most common causes of back pain, which are extremely well researched and documented by a tremendous body of scientific evidence, are things like:
Mechanical back pain, with muscle and fascia strain being the most common by far. But there’s also degenerative disc and facet joint disease, bulging discs, stenosis, osteoporosis, fractures and more.
Neoplasms like metastases, spinal cord tumors, multiple myeloma and more.
Inflammatory diseases like spondylitis, reactive arthritis, IBD and more
There’s a mountain of evidence for these widely varied entities causing both chronic and acute back pain. Evidence for an unknown virus causing back pain seems to be quite sparse if it exists at all.
There’s something I noticed I deem the “Breast Reduction - Doctor Industrial Complex” where basically women with any size breasts will go to a doctor complaining about back pain and the immediate answer is “A breast reduction will cure your back pain”. The problem with this is that I’ve known women with relatively small breasts (32C’s) that were recommended breast reduction to solve back pain by their doctors, they went and got the reduction surgery, and once they got better their back pain persisted.
There’s a massive knee jerk response to any and all back pain on women to “blame it on the breasts” even if that’s obviously not the sole reason.
I treated a LOT of women’s back pain for decades too, and that’s NOT my experience at all. While large breasts can contribute to back pain, and some such women do benefit from breast reduction, it’s not a common diagnosis as a cause for typical female back pain. And even when it is, surgery is far from the first recommended treatment. Only after failing other therapies like meds, physical therapy, home exercise, stretching and rehab regimens would it be considered.
Is there any ailment that is as common and as little understood as back pain? It just strikes me as wacky that this afflicts so many so severely and medical science hasn’t devised a cure or even an approach to relieving the symptoms as this. When I was suffering from it, a few decades back, a colleague recommended the works of John Sarno, MD, and it was the most moonbat crazy stuff I’d read outside of L. Ron Hubbard: he actually recommended that people talk to their backs. As in, “What’s bothering you today, back? You can share your feelings with me.” And this was a respected back specialist!!
And I’ve had friends with very large breasts who sought breast reduction surgery on the hopes it would help their back pain, but had to pay for “cosmetic” breast reduction surgery. K which did hello their back pain.)
I don’t think excessive breast reduction is all that common.
As has already been pointed out, “back pain” can happen for a variety of reasons-it is not a singular ailment. It is like asking “How can I stop my face from getting wet?” Are you sweating? Is it raining? Are you swimming? Did you trip and fall into a puddle? Did someone throw a bucket of water at you? Are you washing your car?
You say that back pain is little understood, but you have admitted to knowing little about the subject, right?
Other than this thread? No, it’s just an admittedly nutty conceit that I’ve been carrying around in my head for a few decades. As to your earlier point: granted, but does it seem to you that medical science is very advanced in figuring out what type of back pain we’re discussing here? Seems to me a hod-carrier gets the same exact treatment from a practitioner that a typist gets, mainly based on which treatment for generic back pain that practitioner is used to prescribing, though one of them lifts loads for a living and the other barely lifts a finger. More to the point, “stress in one’s life” is very often found to be the cause, which sounds very like pure “blaming the victim” mentality. “It’s all in your head–now tell me about your childhood” is pretty common as a treatment, which seems appalingly desperate to me.