Abstract

Low back pain is a very common disease that can be very painful and debilitating. It is also a costly disease which accounts for billions of dollars lost to health care and absence from work. Low back pain is more disabling in developing countries because lack of resources makes proper health care inaccessible to many people. In developing countries many people are employed in manual work and low back pain takes them away from a source of income. Most manual workers in these settings do not have insurance policies to support them when they are absent from work due to disease.

Pharmacological treatment of low back pain has sometimes resulted in opioid dependence which has reached epidemic proportions in some western countries. Opioid dependence is costly to treat and leads to deterioration or loss of human life. It would therefore be beneficial to find an inexpensive and effective treatment of low back pain which has no dependency hazard.

We describe the experiences of an African family physician who suffered from low back pain from early adulthood. He found that drinking lots of water alleviated his low back pain. He found that his low back pain patients also benefited from drinking lots of water when they had an episode of low back pain. We intend to do quantitative studies to test the effectiveness of water treatment in low back pain.

Keywords: Low back pain; Low back pain treatment; Drinking water and low back pain