Low Back Pain: Most Is Non-Specific and Self-Limiting, and It's Badly Over-Treated

Summary

The everyday model of low back pain — "something is structurally wrong in your spine, get a scan, rest it, and escalate to injections or surgery if it persists" — is backwards for the roughly 90 to 95% of cases that are non-specific (no identifiable structural cause): those are best served by staying active rather than resting, plus exercise, education and reassurance, because routine imaging finds age-normal "degeneration" that is nearly as common in pain-free people (disc degeneration in 37% of asymptomatic 20-year-olds rising to 96% of asymptomatic 80-year-olds) and drives a harmful, eviden