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Bookdealer's
Back - When it comes
to backs, books are buggers. 18.10.04.
You probably didn’t notice, but last week was Back Care Awareness Week.
I might not have noticed either, had I not been suffering from a severe case of
Bookdealer’s Back. When
it comes to backs, books are buggers. In quantity, the "wrong sort of books"
can make even a relatively small box intolerably heavy, and difficult to carry
any distance. The "wrong sort of books" (in this context) are usually
art reference works, engorged with more illustrations than is decent, and printed
on paper with the same specific gravity as concrete. These
are the books that invariably do my back in. They lie at the bottom of boxes,
waiting for me to lower my guard, forget the rules, and allow myself to be consumed
by desire. Without iron discipline I am at their mercy. There
I am in the office; an overweight fifty-something, too stupid and lazy to get
up out of his chair and place a (small) pile of books on his desk for cataloguing,
lunging at lovelies, which are just out of reach. Got you! Oh f***ing hell! OK,
so I’ve got a back problem and some bad habits, but I’m obviously not alone. According
to the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy,
two-thirds of Britons have suffered some form of back pain over the past year.
The situation
seems to be much the same in the USA, where 3.7 million people seek medical care
each year for an acute episode of low back pain. A new Ohio
University study, costing some $1.5 million, will examine who is most at risk
from recurrent back pain and what causes it. Given
the nature of secondhand bookselling, I suspect that our "vocation"
harbours a rather greater than average number of back pain sufferers. And given
that the vast majority of us are self-employed, with little, if any, health insurance
to rely on, the economic consequences of incapacitating back pain can be considerable. On
this occasion I've been out of action, with frequently excruciating back pain,
for the best part of ten days. In the past I’ve tended to favour the proactive
approach, and have used both the Feldenkrais
Method and the Alexander
Technique. Alas, I'm not very good at keeping up the exercises. Last
week I tried the Cranial
Osteopath that the rest of my family raves about, and think the treatment
offered by back2normal
sounds interesting. Anyway,
if you’ve bothered to read this far you are probably a fellow sufferer, and I’d
like to hear from you. What exacerbates
your problem, how do you cope with it, which therapies or techniques work for
you? If I get
enough of a responce, I’ll try to put together a back pain resources page. Mike
Goodenough
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