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Whether nagging, dull, searing or constant, back pain sends more of us to the doctor than any other ailment except the common cold.
Some 25.3 million American adults experience chronic back pain; at least 70 percent of us will experience some type of it in our lives. And our modern lifestyles are at least partly to blame, doctors say. We sit too much. We hunch over phones and computers. We don’t move enough. We are too fat.
Drugs, particularly opioids, have long been the first line of therapy, especially for the chronic, nonspecific kind of back pain for which doctors can identify no obvious cause. That, as it turns out, was a mistake.
“Health care providers didn’t look at evidence as carefully as we should have early on and continued to prescribe, not realizing risks outweighed the benefits,” says David Shurtleff, acting director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. He notes that very often, acute back pain will go away on its own with time. It's just that not many of us feel like waiting.
With national rates on opioid use and addiction reaching crisis numbers (in 2015 an estimated 91.8 million American adults — more than a third of the population — used prescription opioids) and new research showing they are not all that effective for garden-variety back pain, it may be time to consider alternatives.
The American College of Physicians now recommends a host of alternative measures, such as exercise, tai chi, cognitive behavioral therapy, or even acupuncture. These alternatives can provide real, if not miracle-like, relief and may need to be combined for best results.
Below are a few options that science and doctors say are worth exploring — one, two or three at a time.