What was done with people w/severe back pain in years past?

I’m facing surgery in two days (hallelujah!), but the crippling pain I’m in has me wondering what would have been my fate had I lived in a different time. It’s such an easy fix surgically–just go in, cut away the part of the disc that’s pressing on the nerve, and presto! No more nerve pain! (Seriously–that’s how it was last time. Woke up nerve-pain free!) I will be walking (if a bit stiffly) the next day.

10,000 years ago I would have been fodder for a predator, I assume. I can’t walk, stand, or sit, so I’m an easy meal.

But what about 1000 years ago? 100 years ago? What would have been my fate? Bed and opiates?

You would have to adjust for age and numerous other factors. Also, you’re begging the question a bit, because I don’t know if back surgery is better than doing nothing except resting and getting back into the groove slowly and steadily.

How does back surgery stack up in the long run?

Also, as to the health of those in years past, where they sitting around watching TV, or carrying around the excess weight that X millions of people are now carrying?

Answering the OP: They probably did what people do today with an injury sans treatment: if possible, they took it easy as much as possible. If not possible, they turned to booze or anything else to survive. Or, they lived with pain and died many years on average before we do.

Maybe you should ask what people do TODAY, as many can afford the surgery, but their situation is such that they cannot be out of work for the time it takes. They are, more or less, similar to you, living in today’s world, reaping the benefits and suffering the downfalls, but must live with the pain.

The real question is how they do it.

Well, a hundred years ago you could literally walk into a store and buy cocaine cough drops or morphine lollipops. haha. So I would guess that you would have no trouble finding an opiate to calm your pain a bit.

Not like nowadays where you have to Doctor shop until you find one compassionate enough to give you something as simple as a script for vicodin or percocet.

God help you if you’re in terrible pain and need 15mg Oxycodone or 40mg Oxycontin. Phew, good luck there. Nowadays you can get cocaine and heroin easier than you can get something for pain.

10,000 years ago? Sorry, you’d be up shits creek.

Philster, I don’t mean to confuse the issue. My basic question remains the same, although I suppose it could be generalized to anyone with severe pain issues.

I currently post over at the message boards for Spine Health.com, and there are a lot of people over there with problems far more complex and chronic than mine that are in constant, crippling pain. Some have had surgeries, some have conditions that do not have a surgical answer. Some have problems that have been easily (using the term loosely) fixed surgically.

I just wonder what life would have been like a century or millenia ago with similar conditions, especially since there was quite a bit more hard labor at the time. Yes, they were likely more in shape than the average human today, but they also were doing a lot of the things that can be torturous on the back. I’m thinking of the Egyptians building the pyramids, for one, though an injured slave was probably a dead slave.

digglebop, my experience has been the opposite of what you have described. Doctors have thrown multiple prescriptions for pain meds at me when I have expressly stated I do not want them if I have a treatable condition. Do not mask my symptoms; find the source, and correct it if possible. They huff, they puff, they send me for an MRI…and then upon seeing it say, “Ohhhhhh. Well, let’s send you to the neurosurgeon.”

Back pain is something that often comes with aging, so perhaps ten thousand years ago, when people didn’t live as long as we do now, they didn’t have much of it. Analysis of the spines of old skeletons could probably say whether or not that’s true.

From Egyptologist tells story of commoner pyramid builders

Things were quite different, even as recently as 30 years ago. Back surgery was done, but the patients I knew did not go right to “pain-free”. They had daily, if not continuous pain. They could walk, which was better than before the surgery. Two men I knew were getting around pretty well with serious pain meds. Both died in car accidents, driving while medicated. :frowning: :frowning:

There’s a much better success rate now. All that stuff in my first paragraph is history.

Thing is, I had back pain such that vicodin had about as much effect as TicTacs. The only thing that came close was enough morphine to knock me out.

And there was no “just taking it easy”, I couldn’t stand, sit, lay down…nothing… to ease the pain.

I had my first back surgery 24 years ago and could barely walk at all. I woke up the next morning and strolled to the bathroom. Before, I had to roll out of bed onto all fours and crawl until I could finally pull myself upright. After, I could get out of bed normally the very next day and never had so much as an aspirin for the pain.

I’ve often though of the exact scenario as the OP. After my experience with a few weeks of this pain, I know what I’d have done. Suicide, no doubt about it. I couldn’t live like that, I was close to going insane as it was (I know, I’m not a mental health specialist, I don’t know what “insane” is, etc. All I know is, I was very close to losing it from the pain, lack of sleep, but mainly just eternal pain. Never ending, never letting up, never easing a bit, excruciating pain. )

Bed and opiates, pretty much, yep.

If you were a member of a prehistoric nomadic tribal group, I suppose whether they found a way to take you with them would depend on their tribal ethos, and how valuable you were to them. Archeologists have found Neolithic skeletons with indications that a badly broken bone was allowed to heal, which says that somebody, somewhere, nursed that person back to health.

Up until just a few generations ago (the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, which also addressed cocaine), an assortment of opiates were widely and freely available for pain. People basically used those. So if you lived in the U.S., had chronic back pain, and could afford it, up till 1914 you could just go down to the store and buy some laudanum. After that, you’d have to get a doctor to prescribe it for you.

And I would assume that in ancient times, folks in Eurasia made liberal use of opiates as soon as the uses of the sap of the opium poppy became known, which quite possibly could have been 10,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is the great experimenter, and it wouldn’t have taken long for some more adventurous eater to discover the interesting effects of ingesting papaver somniferum.

And they’ve found evidence of poppy use in ancient Sumer.

Willow bark is also a painkiller, and is available worldwide.

South America had the coca plant.

And, yanno, people just lived with pain, a lot of the time. Depending on your mindset, you could also think of it as “your cross to bear”, or a trial sent by whatever god or gods you worshiped. Or the Neolithic tribesmen might have chalked it up to someone’s having put a curse on them, or they must have offended a god, or, heck, maybe they just hurt themselves hacking apart a mammoth carcass, and life sucks, yanno? or something. Either way, the pain wasn’t viewed as something that was fixable, unless they could figure out how to undo the hex or propitiate the god…So they just lived with it.

Sorry if I was a bit smug, but I was trying to say that there are people right now, all over the world, numbering in the millions, that face the same situations that you are looking into the distant past for.

These people span the glob. Considering there are at least two billion people with access to squat, surely there are a million or more severe back-pain sufferers with nothing they can do about it. I’d reckon there are a few million in China and India alone.

They are in pain, crippling pain, and face the very same issues…right now, circa 2007. Sort of changes the reality, which is that you could research the issue w/out a flux capacitor. :slight_smile:

Fortunately yesterday my doc finally gave me a scrip for vicodin. I’m using it sparingly, and it does ease the agony.

I was going to try to find a heroin dealer downtown, but then I found out they don’t take Medicare. :smiley:

I’ve wondered about this.

A well known doctor by the name of John Sarno claims that before the WW2 era, men in the United States never complained of back pain. I think his premise is that it somehow became OK to be disabled with back pain and became a kind of psychological release for men with no other such releases.

He seems to have a big following, but I had a huge extruding herniation of my L5S1 and crushed a nerve root, and I think he’s as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey. All you have to do is bang your elbow to learn that crushing nerves hurts. And my foot’s still goddam half paralyzed now, a couple years later, after surgery and a bunch else.

I have two theories.

One is that there used to be many more people that were lame or otherwise somewhat disbled, and that often it was because of disk and nerve problems that today would likely be fixed, or at least improved. So that’s some of the answer to the OP.

And the other theory, which I have read elsewhere, is that it is very straightforward to relieve a crushed nerve by taking the disk off of it, and you reliably get a big improvement quickly (though you may not fix everything, especially if it’s been crushed too long). So back surgery for crushed nerves is good. But on the other hand pain felt in the spine itself is hard to figure out and back surgery for that is a much less sure bet.

I agree that he’s full of shit. Here’s part of the text of a 1906 book on chiropractic; it lists “lumbago” as something to be treated, lumbago of course being “lower back pain”. It also includes “sciatica”. Chiropractors certainly didn’t have “ladies only” practices, so why were they set up to treat back pain if there weren’t any men complaining of it?

The Iceman mummy that they found in the Alps had extensive tattooing, including on his lower back. I have read speculation that this was done therapeutically, to “treat” back pain. It might have helped a bit, as a counter-irritant, and probably as a placebo as well.

Regards,
Shodan

I’m sure that all of us who have back pain severe enough that one literally cannot walk for several days have wondered about this.

In my case, I’d hope that they would take me out back and put me out of my misery! :wink:

And then there’s my brother, who had a kidney stone last week and was told by his doctor “Well, it’s not that big. You’ll probably be fine with Advil.”

My wife’s a migraine sufferer, and had to go through many doctors who would just condescendingly prescribe extra-Tylenol (or just cut back on the caffeine, or maybe a nice massage would help?), it took her forever to find someone who recognized the condition as something that requires a genuine treatment.

Pain hurts. It’s amazing how many doctors fail to understand that.