Sunday, July 19, 2009

How I Cured My Herniated Disc...

.. unintentionally. I am curious if it will work for others.

Anyway, here is the story. Starting as a young teenager I backpacked with my family almost every summer until I was into my 20s. The backpack trips were great, but I just came to accept that part of the experience was that the waist-belt that carried the majority of the weight of the backpack would rub the skin on my hip raw.

Later, as an adult I was visiting Alaska and had the opportunity to backpack the Chilkoot Pass trail. Actually the Alaskan trip was atleast partially motivated by the fact that my desk job combined with poor posture had created a herniated disc in my lower back that I could feel. I was hoping that getting out and doing a lot of walking or hiking would help to correct it. It was not extremely painful, but there was considerable discomfort, and I had the distinct feeling that I had better be careful with my back if I wanted to avoid permanent damage to it. I had tried several methods that all seemed to work for in the short term to alleviate the discomfort, but did not eliminate it.

In Alaska I had the same backpack with me that I had used as a teenager, but had not used it for many years, and had forgotten how painful a raw hip can be. I don't know if my tolerance for pain had decreased, or if my expectations for life had increased, but I re-experienced those rubbed-raw hips and I swore that would be the last backpack trip I would ever use a weight-bearing waist-belt.

I arrived back in California from my Alaskan trip a little earlier than anticipated and decided to try a backpack trip in the Sierras, but with something different. I had read about tumplines being used by Indians, French voyageur porters, and maybe some backpackers in the northeast US, but in all my years of backpacking in the Sierras I had never seen one used. I thought I would try one out. I got some 2" webbing from an Army Surplus store and installed some grommets in the ends of a piece that was about 6 foot long. I drilled holes in my external pack frame, and installed clevis pins that also fit through the webbing grommets.

I retained the shoulder straps and waist-belt of the pack frame, but used them only to keep the weight from shifting when I tried the new rig out around town. It felt so comfortable that I was encouraged to load myself up with considerably more than I had ever carried on any previous trips. On the first day's climb out of the South Fork of the Kings River I was carrying almost 90 pounds, which was 35 lbs more than I had ever carried. Surprisingly, it was not any less comfortable than 55 lbs had been with the waist-belt / shoulder-strap rig. The only exception was that where the tumpline contacted the top of my head did become a little painful, so that I had to stop and change strap positions every few miles. If I did it again I would bring along some padding for the top of the head-- maybe even just a watch cap. I remember thinking to myself, that with this much weight on my head for this length of time I would be lucky if the expected neck-muscle soreness would even allow me to turn my head the next day. The first amazing thing I noticed on the trip was that my neck never became sore-- at all!

I am not sure what happened along the way, or when it happened, but it was the third or fourth night when I was in my sleeping bag that I thought I would see how the old herniated disc was doing. It hadn't been giving me any problems. I ran my hand down the left side of my spine where it had been and I could not find it. It was gone and has never returned!

Now, here is my theory of why it happened:

I believe in Creation. I don't want to go into why here. I will probably treat it in a future blog, but I can suffice it here to say that I do not have the typical Christian view of Creation, but I think the theory of Evolution is ridiculous, except in a very small contributory way. Anyway, if you study anatomy you find that both the shoulder joints are quite "iffy", and we know from our experience with older people that the hip joint has enough stress put on it just from routine life activity. Putting extra weight on the hip does not seem like a smart idea. So, one way to approach the question of how to carry weight with the body optimally is to try to reconcile the weight-carrying activity with the design intention of the Creator. How to discover that intention? Well, a way to take a good guess at it anyway is just to look at a skeleton. Look for a strong structure or connected structure in the vertical plane, and it should preferably be along a main axis of symmetry. Looking at a skeleton hanging there in the Anatomy room, there is really only one structure that fits these criteria-- the spine. On further examination the spine seems to have load-bearing as its main purpose. It is not big on flexibility. It has no "iffy joints". The vertebra, starting from the top and working downwards, become progressively larger, stronger and more solid, until at last they actually become fused together in the coccyx. This progression is in alignment with the fact that the lower parts of the spine are carrying more and more weight of the body. So, the spine seems to be what the Creator was thinking of as the main weight-bearing structure in the body.

Now its time to make a leap of what might be called "faith", but what I prefer to just think of as good design practice. There are many ways that the body can be used and exercised. Some of these ways are not so good for its continued health. What if the Creator wanted a way to communicate to the future operator of the body what the best way or ways were to utilize it? How about a feed-back mechanism designed into the body that allowed the body to maintain or even correct itself to some degree when the operator adheres to, or atleast approaches a useage designed/intended for it by the Creator? If I assume such a feed-back mechanism exists for the useage of the spine as a weight-bearing structure, then I can explain two phenomena of that back-pack trip that are otherwise unexplainable:

1) The neck muscles never became sore, even to the slightest degree. I was not consuming alcohol (atleast in the first days of the trip), nor any other type of medication. This was despite the fact that I was carrying almost 90 lbs of weight, and I weighed at the time less than 160 lbs.

2) The herniated disc, which had plagued me for atleast a year previously, dissappeared permanently.

A possible additional facet to this feed-back mechanism is that there may be a minimum "threshold value" of weight required to "kick it" into effect. If so, I certainly had a good shot at meeting any such weight requirement by hanging well over half my body weight on the spine.



Additional notes on tumpline useage:

1) The tumpline goes over the TOP of the head, and NOT on the forehead. It should really go over the back part of the top of the head, so as to allow the weight of the pack to more closely parallel the spinal column.

2) Always use shoulder-straps as an unweighted "back-up" system. In jumping from rock to rock you don't want the tumpline strap to come loose and wind up with the weight of the pack hanging from your neck!

3) Leave the waist-strap on also, but unweight it. It will keep the pack from swinging from side to side as you walk.

4) I don't know if you can buy a tumpline, but you can certainly make one yourself and attach it as noted above to an external frame pack. You just have to be willing to drill a hole in that nice pack frame.

So, hey, I haven't heard if it will work for anyone else. If you try it and it works, please let me know.

No comments:

Post a Comment