The length of hospital stay after knee and hip replacement surgery has, over the last several years, decreased significantly. Reasons for this include concerns regarding costs and attempts to keep those costs down.

Natural healing along with understanding how your back works are the basis of recovery from low back pain. Understanding how the low back is injured allows for prevention of low back attacks. Referring to the illustrations, notice that the spine is constructed of one vertebra stacked on top of the other with a flexible spacer, which acts as a load-bearing fulcrum in between.

Lumbar spinal stenosis is a condition characterized by either low back pain or numbness, and/or a weakness in the lower extremities that occurs with standing, walking, or arising from sitting to standing. Stenosis is a Greek word that describes an abnormal narrowing of a duct or canal.

Using data obtained by questionnaire in a retrospective review of pati ents with low-back and sciatic pain (eighty-five treated by injection of chymopapain and seventy-one, by open discectomy), the results at one and ten years after treatment were analyzed.

Low back pain is one of the most common ailments in Western Society: 80% of all adults have significant back pain during their lifetime. Of the working population, 26% will experience low back pain annually and 8% will experience a low back disability. Over a lifetime, 28% of an industrial population will be at least temporarily disabled by back pain.

Forty-five low back pain patients were randomly assigned to either a standard inpatient rehabilitation program or the standard program with additional psychological components. The standard program emphasized education, support, and physical reconditioning through exercise.