HELPING heal patients of lower-back pain has been a passion in life for Cockburn GP Chris Chin for two decades.
He has practised laser acupuncture for more than 20 years and said he had discovered what caused most people’s lower-back pain.
It was not the spine that caused the pain but the surrounding structures that supported it, Dr Chin added.
“Postures and movements we carry out daily cause the lower ribs to come into contact with the hip bone – what we call ilio-costal impingement,” he said.
“This causes damage to the lateral abdominal and spinal muscles, thereby causing low back pain and often sciatica.
“It has been assumed that the space between the lower ribs and top of the hips was wide enough to provide most people with a safe margin.
“But some years ago I carried out a survey of 50 patients with lower-back pain, and discovered that the average gap between the ribs and the hips was only 5cm.
“As a result, people with poor postures, those who do not sit properly or individuals lifting weights from ground level are particularly prone to ilio-costal impingement.”
Dr Chin has written and published the book Be Your Own Back Guru.
Dr Chin recently presented his hip-rib impingement theory of back pain to a Primary Health Care Research Evaluation and Development Conference at Notre Dame University and made a second presentation to the first Australian Lifestyle Medicine Conference in Sydney in March.
The Journal of Complementary Medicine approached him to publish his theory in their latest edition.
Dr Chin is no stranger to back pain as he developed a bad back when he worked as a general practitioner in the 1980s, which, in turn, led to him looking for a cure.