“I am a pain medicine doctor who sees low back pain in my clinic everyday. So I can say, as an insider, that conventional medicine is failing patients with low back pain.
I would sooner have most of my patients read Back Mechanic and follow its advice than receive the “standard of care” I see most doctors using. This “standard” approach is characterized by using weird drugs like gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication used also for nerve pain), dangerous opioids, expensive and largely ineffective spine injections and general prescriptions to see a physical therapist or chiropractor that leaves you no better, if not worse off.
The reason for this tragic failure is conventional medicine has forgotten that almost all low back pain is a MECHANICAL issue. It’s not a psychological issue to be dealt with through anti-depressants and stress reduction. It’s not a mysterious accident that came from nowhere. Low back pain is almost always caused by flawed or excessive mechanical stress from improper postures, movements and loads.
In my professional opinion, there is no better authority to teach about low back pain and how to fix it than the author Professor McGill. He is one of the best spine researchers ever and also—here is the crazy part—one of the the best spine clinicians ever. It is rare to have this combination of world-class scientific accomplishment and clinical wisdom in one person. More than 300 medical journal articles published and countless elite athletes restored to world-class performance after what lesser clinicians had condemned them to the scrap heap of “career-ending” back injury.”
Back Mechanic is a distillation of over 30 years of knowledge and wisdom in an engaging and accessible text intended for the lay public.
There’s a reason this work is one of near-universal acclaim: it has the ability to help normal people solve the riddle of their own back pain. Back Mechanic breaks down low back pain to its foundational components. It explains how back pain happens. It instructs patients on how to diagnose themselves, albeit with the supervision of a doctor. It tells patients how to treat themselves through avoiding certain postures and movements and what exercises to perform to restore their spine health.
This is the single best book on low back pain for the general public.”