Spine: The backbone

Spine or the backbone is the main pillar of our body, which is essential to support and function of our upper limbs (hands for a layman) and lower limbs.

For better understanding, it is as essential to our body as the strong concrete and iron pillar for a strong and durable building.

But in the present scenario with a stressful and restless life, it has to bear a lot of stress, wear and tear, jerks, which also affects ageing.

Apart from these, our body may suffer from a lot of other conditions such as neck pain, back pain especially low back with or without radicular pain (as sciatica in the lower limbs), fractures of the spine with or without spinal cord injury, inflammatory arthropathies (as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis etc.), infection (TB etc), various types of spinal tumours, various types of spine deformities as scoliosis (s shaped spine), kyphosis (kubar in layman), kyphoscoliosis and spondylolisyhesis etc.

In the spine, both bone and soft tissues like disc etc. are important for harmonious biomechanics. As bone gives strength, disc acts as a shock absorber and maintains the balance of the body. But our body can suffer from disc prolapse (PIVD) and canal stenosis as lumbar canal stenosis (LCS) due to various causes.

These problems may affect our day-to-day activities, our quality of life and may lead to depression in many people. You can face difficulty in walking, tiredness in buttocks and legs, pain in lower limbs and in a few cases involvement of bladder and bowel also known as cauda equina syndrome.

Management of all of these problems is not very difficult in the present era.

If such problems persist, one should consult a good spine surgeon and discuss all yours problems in detail.

Most of the problems can be managed conservatively with the help of life style changes, some physiotherapy and if required, medication.

Though treatment may be lengthy and in many cases surgical intervention is required, then one should go for it.

In the 21st century, people are scared of spine surgeries, but in expert hands, they are safe and give fruitful results.