Why does your lower back hurt so much? Part 1
This episode is entitled “Why does my lower back hurt so much? Part 1”. It is the 5th of our six pillar episodes. This is part one, which is a story about a curious incident that occurred last Friday which led to the Grand unifying theory of pain. In part two (episode six), I will elaborate more into the theory of pain in which you’ll get an equation for pain based on everything talked about in this episode. Now the question, why does my lower back hurt so much? Really what you’re asking is why and what determines that my lower back hurt so much? In order to get to that, I’m going to tell you a story.
The story of Gavin’s wasp sting
Last Friday I was cycling to work as is normal for me. A couple of miles from home and I felt a small jab in my upper thigh. I looked down and there’s a wasp sitting on my shorts, it’s summertime here so it’s cycling shorts weather, and I could tell by the jab the little blighter had stung me. I brushed it off and observed what happened. I’m not a fan of suffering pain, but I am a fan of studying it. This was a perfect opportunity to observe what happened subsequent to this wasps sting. I don’t know a lot about insects, but I know when they sting you, they put a little toxin into you, and your body reacts against that, which leads to pain. It certainly did in both in that initial jab and very soon thereafter, within seconds my thigh was sore.
Pain observation (and how it might impact the severity of your lower back hurt):
As I was cycling along I noticed that sometimes I was aware of the pain and other times I wasn’t aware of it at all. While cycling along, legs moving vigorously, typically I didn’t feel any pain but when I stopped, I felt more pain and yet the sting was constant. It was in there. The toxins were in there. The toxins weren’t reduced -but the pain was variable. My second observation relates to attention and the pain felt. So whenever I thought about my sting, I could feel the pain but when there was lots happening (traffic, people walking out in front of me, etc.) I wasn’t aware of any pain at all. Apparently, my attention to my thigh seemed to be directly correlated with the amount of pain that I could feel.
Now I am not usually much of a catastrophizer, but in this instance my mind did drift to the possibility that I might have an anaphylactic response. Although never having had an anaphylactic response before, it’s not impossible. And certainly as soon as I started thinking about this possibility of anaphylaxis my pain seemed to increase. Fortunately, that didn’t last long because I reminded myself, I’ve never had anaphylaxis before and actually I’m super healthy so I started to reflect on how healthy I am and that made me feel good. Then all of a sudden I went from feeling quite anxious about the pain and having more pain to reassuring myself and not feeling the pain anymore.
These are my observations about my wasp sting and how they impacted on my severity of pain:
