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Low back pain: a composite of interacting systems?

Published on July 30, 2015   25 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
Hello. My name's Alison McGregor. I'm a professor of Musculoskeletal Biodynamics at Imperial College, London, and I've been asked to talk to you today about lower back pain and the composite of its interacting systems and how they work.
0:14
Just to give an overview of what I'm going to tell you about, first of all, I want to allude to different aspects of structure and function, and how they interlink. And I then want to explain how some of these links are made through different modelling, and theories, and ideas. And hopefully by the end of this, you'll see that it's not quite as straightforward as we may have thought.
0:35
Normal function has actually been described as a composite of three different systems. We have a skeletal system, which, to you and I, are the bones of skeleton, a muscular system, which is, not surprisingly, the muscles that make your joints work, but also a higher center, a control system, which is the brain. And hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll see how these three systems have to work together to allow us to have normal function, and when they don't work, it's been postulated that you get some level of dysfunctional, structural compensation in the body.
1:07
First of all though, I'd like to talk through the skeletal system.
1:12
If we think with the spine initially, we know it's the central core of the body, and from which our upper limb, our head, and our lower limbs are attached to. We know it's got a very complex structure of muscles surrounding it, and it has very many discrete roles in the body. But what you may not know is if you actually dissect the spine, and take away all those muscles, it actually buckles which just 2 kilograms of load going through it.
1:37
So that then begs the question, how does the spine function?

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Low back pain: a composite of interacting systems?

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