Chronic Back Pain

When my Dad was a young man he fell off a roof while working a construction job and herniated a vertebral disc. Thinking it wasn’t serious he had my mother walk on his back in an attempt to pop or fix whatever was wrong, and the pain was so great it nearly paralyzed him. He finally got it operated on, but to this day continues to have serious back pain any time he sits for long periods of time and has difficulty enjoying movies, road trips, and sometimes just sitting on the couch.

Because of my experience with my father, when I started having back pain in my mid-twenties I always thought it was something structural, that maybe I had injured my back lifting weights or strained it while running. I had a desk job, as a motion graphics artist, and would sit for 10 or more hours every single day. My back killed me. It hurt so much that it made me hate my job, and I tried for years to do things like yoga, taking walks, massage, stretching, and taking copious amounts of pain killers to deal with it. I even tried special chairs. Absolutely none of it worked, and the pain was so constant and so relentless I cut back on my work and feared that one day I might have to have surgery.

Well into my research for my book and health problems my back pain actually got worse. It became so bad that I found myself having to lift my body out of my bed and out of chairs by my hands as if I were a feeble 70-year-old. I couldn’t hardly stand up straight after sitting without using my hands to prop myself up. But as my knowledge and experience had grown I began to suspect that what was causing my back pain had nothing to do with injury and would never be cured by surgery.

I had, during the course of my experimentations and research, been trying out different probiotics in the search for curing gut dysbiosis and SIBO which I knew to be at the root of many of my health problems, and it was during this experimentation after consuming the Japanese dish known as natto for its unique probiotic properties and high vitamin K2 content that my back pain had gotten so much worse. I began to suspect that either my condition made me susceptible to certain pathogenic bacteria, or it was those bacteria outright which were the cause. After suffering this incredible deterioration for several weeks I resolved to use iodine to knock it out, and within two days of using it my back pain completely vanished. Gone. Not even a little bit of the debilitating, excruciating pain. Suddenly I was able to get up and move around as if I had never had such specific health problems. Later when doing more experimentation I bought and used a specific probiotic of Bacillus subtilis, a strain often promoted as a probiotic and the primary microbe used in the preparation of natto, and the debilitating back pain returned immediately, within a single day. Having my prior suspicions confirmed I again knocked it out with iodine and other, actually useful probiotics.

Amazingly, when I try to help people with such problems they often just don’t even believe me, and for no good reason. I have spent the last six years of my life researching and experimenting many health problems and have amassed an unrivaled understanding of the human body, written two books, and possess a collection of studies to support my work so vast if published it would add another 50 pages to my book. It’s not like these people even try out my advice, they just simply refuse to listen and insist on persisting with the pain. Someone I know with chronic back pain even chose to undergo surgery than try to first eradicate the bacteria which cause it. Such surgical procedures are done by scoring connective tissue, to injure it and “lengthen” the connection. It’s actually a very traumatic procedure for those tissues and recovery involves the deposition of fibrotic tissue to repair those incisions which will in the long run cause more pain as the body ages. This problem is even harder for people who, like my Dad, have actual back injuries and attribute their suffering only to that injury, and no other cause, and for some reason would rather persist in that pain than even try the simple steps I recommend which can and do resolve it, in spite of the injury.

The reason that back pain is caused by bacteria and not injury is that one of the major muscle groups responsible for our ability to stand upright, the psoas, runs directly through the gut and the intestinal system. As we age or suffer metabolic disease, opportunistic bacteria like Bacillus subtilis enter and take up residence in our gut, and many harmful microbes produce toxic byproducts like endotoxin, exotoxin, lactic acid, ammonia, histamine, and indole, as well as some like B. subtilis which are proteolytic and actually eat through the wall of the intestinal system and invade the circulation and the tissues in the core of our body. Because the psoas runs right through this mess of microbial activity it is highly susceptible to exposure to these toxic metabolites, which in turn reduce or outright inhibit the ability of the psoas cells to regenerate and heal. This in turn causes the psoas and its connective tendons, as well as ligaments in the spine and pelvic region, to stiffen, calcify, and become rigid, making it even more susceptible to injury and highly unable to heal injury that does occur, and because the psoas connects to the entire lower third of the spine, this makes it feel like the pain is a problem with the back and not with the gut. Because these microbes also stay in the gut unless action is taken to eradicate them and improve the diet and overall metabolic health, they simply churn out a constant and steady stream of toxic metabolites, and then we are left thinking that the problem is serious damage which requires surgery. Eradicating these harmful microbes can heal back pain entirely in a matter of days. Even more serious injuries like a herniated disc are strongly influenced by these microbes too and often could heal as well if the interfering metabolites were eliminated.

Chronic back pain is easy to resolve. It simply requires eradicating gut bacteria and replacing them with those which are actually healthy, which also by the way are not those which are commonly sold. More serious back injuries can also be addressed. My book, Fuck Portion Control, spends much time talking about how to accomplish both of these as well as what microbes are most safe and useful for the purposes of restoring gut integrity, fixing back pain, and improving overall metabolic health. You can also read other articles that can assist with restoring metabolic health such as my recent discovery on the cause of hyperphosphatemia, or the first four chapters of Fuck Portion Control.