I, and many people I know, suffer some kind of back pain, often crippling. Is it because humans haven鈥檛 been bipedal for long enough for evolution to have perfected the art of walking upright? And if we are in pain now, what kind of pain must the early bipeds have endured?
鈥� I would suggest that the problem is the opposite: we are devolving and, as a result, suffering from back pain.
For thousands of years our ancestors walked everywhere, hunting for food. If these hominids were constantly in pain, I assume they would have gone back to the trees to resume their earlier, fruit-based diet. Instead, their modern African equivalents are still walking, sometimes taking days to catch their prey, and until relatively recently, humans used muscle power to grow and harvest crops.
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But now we live indoors with a sedentary lifestyle and, consequently, we don鈥檛 exercise our supporting muscles. Hence, back pain.
John James, Watford, Hertfordshire, UK
鈥� Evolution is not in the business of perfecting anything. As , the comparative anatomist, put it in his book Bones (Macmillan, 1994): 鈥淓volution鈥� starts from an existing design and alters it progressively by a series of small changes over many generations. The final product (for example, an amphibian) may be very different from its ancestor (for example, a fish), but every stage in the evolutionary sequence must be an effective design, capable of holding its own in a competitive world.
鈥淎s a result, many of the features of a species may not be ideal for its way of life, but may be (more or less) the best that evolution could do, starting from that species鈥� ancestors.鈥�
This might lead you to infer that our back structure and upright posture are less than ideal, hence the tendency for so many people to have back problems. Numerous books take this line, implying that we learned to stand upright too quickly, evolutionarily speaking, and have not yet fully adapted to it. This may be true to some extent, but there are facts that support an alternative explanation.
For example, a great number of people never suffer from back pain at all. Does this mean that those who do have a less 鈥渆volved鈥� back? I have heard that argument and, if true, it would seem to condemn those with bad backs to a lifetime of pain.
However, it is possible to reverse the descending spiral of damage and discomfort, returning to a healthy back and a pain-free existence. In my own case, I suffered from a moderate amount of back pain decades ago in my twenties, but through the , I became aware of how many bad habits I had acquired. I had a slumping posture, chronic tension, was habitually bending in my lower back rather than at my hip joints and so on. Once I learned how to carry myself in a more balanced manner throughout all my activities, these pains disappeared. As a bonus, all movement is now easier and freer than previously.
This makes us similar to most other animals, with a system that generally functions quite well. We differ from them in that we are capable of creating furniture and devices which may look nice, but force us into using our spine badly, and have lifestyles that lead us to lose touch with our once natural movements.
It seems clear that the incidence of back problems is increasing in our modern societies as we leave the land and other physical work for a more sedentary life in offices and cities.
鈥淭he incidence of back problems in society is increasing as we leave the land for offices and cities鈥�
I speculate that our ancestors had far fewer back problems than we have now.
David Gorman, Anatomist, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
鈥� I suspect that bipedalism has little to do with the back problems we suffer. Over the course of 17 years as a veterinary surgeon, I have diagnosed and treated countless back problems in dogs, cats and even rabbits. According to my knowledge, the frequency and severity of the problems they encounter appear to be much the same as our own.
As far as dogs are concerned, there are undoubtedly cases where selective breeding has predisposed them to slipped discs, and an overenthusiastic use of restraining devices is responsible for a fair proportion of neck problems. But non-pedigree dogs that have not been dragged about by their necks also get backache and neck ache from various causes.
Non-pedigree domestic cats usually experience little or no unhealthy selection pressures from humankind but, though they suffer from far fewer back problems than dogs, these issues still occur.
In summary, quadrupeds can get backache too.
Paul Adkin, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK