Back pain due to bad posture is one of the most annoying and uncomfortable feelings. The majority of Americans will have to deal with such problem at some point of their life.
What is even worse is that about 30% of them won’t have luck with conventional treatments and the pain and problem will become chronic.
Back Pain Due To Bad Posture – Facts
However, only a small number of modern people know that there are certain cultures around the globe that don’t have significant problems with back pain and tribesmen from one particular tribe from central India have never experienced such problems.
A recent study has shown that even the discs located in their backs show only small signs of degeneration from the aging process.
A reputable acupuncturist that works in Palo Alto, California, believes that she knows the answer.
She has already visited several countries around the globe and analyzed cultures that have only small number of back pain cases.
She was especially focused on the way they sit, stand and walk and now she is willing to share her experience and opinion.
Twenty years ago, Esther Gokhale began experiencing back pain in her own body right after she gave birth to a healthy child. According to Esther, this pain was so sharp she had trouble sleeping for many days.
Primal posture: Ubong indigenous people from Borneo (on the right side) display the ideal J-shaped spines. A woman in Burkina Faso (on the left side) holds her baby in a way that keeps her baby’s spine straight. In the middle, there is an image displaying a S-shaped spine based on modern anatomy books and the J-shaped spine as described in anatomy book from 1987 called Traite d’Anatomie Humaine.
Esther was suffering from a herniated disc. The only solution was surgery. However, about one year after the procedure was finished, the pain appeared again. The doctors advised another back surgery, but Esther didn’t want to spend the rest of her life recovering from surgeries.
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That’s why she decided to look for a permanent solution for her problem. She had her doubts that conventional medicine practiced in the Western countries cannot help her achieve that, so she focused on some alternative methods. After a while she decided to visit the cultures and people who didn’t suffer from these problems and to learn more about their lifestyle.
For ten years, Gokhale traveled in different corners of our planet, learning more about people and cultures that live isolated and cultures that were not heavily affected by modern life. On her journey, she visited a small village in Portugal, the high mountains in Ecuador and some isolated villages located in West Africa.
Gokhale says that she had really interesting experience because in some places, children were crying because they have never seen white people before. She took videos and photos of people when they walked doing their usual daily tasks like carrying buckets of water, gathering firewood or sat on the ground preparing meals.
In some cases men and women have spent more than seven hours bent over collecting water chestnuts and other foods. What is interesting is that these people were actually old, but they didn’t experience many difficulties to perform this daily routine.
Gokhale was puzzled with this occurrence and she wanted to find out what all these people share together and what connects them. One of the first things she noticed was the specific shape of the spine. Almost all of these people had a regal-looking posture. This is something that makes them different than Americans and most Europeans.
If you take a closer look at the spines of people who live in the western countries from the profile you will notice a spine in a shape that resembles the letter S. in other words, the spine is curved at the bottom and at the top.
What Gokhale noticed is that the two curves don’t appear in people who are free of back pain. This means that the S shape is not something normal and natural. The J-shaped spine is what we all need and want.
There is enough evidence from other sources to support this claim. For example, the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and Gray’s Anatomy book that dates back from the beginning of the 20th century feature images of spines that have nothing to do with modern S-shaped spines. If you take a closer look the spines look similar to the letter J.
In addition, you can notice the J-shaped spine in children and in most statues from the ancient times. This is the natural design of human spine.
That’s why, Esther decided to focus on getting her spine back into J shape. Soon after that she started to feel better. Gokhale didn’t stop here and decided to help other back pain sufferers. She designed several exercises, wrote a detailed book and opened a studio in Palo Alto. She is very successful and has many famous clients in her list like Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO and Matt Drudge the founder of the Drudge Report.
Via NPR
