LOW BACK PAIN

Abstract

During the past five years especially, great strides have been made toward a clearer understanding of the protean causes of low back pain. With this broader knowledge, contributed to by many orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, the accurate diagnosis of low back pain has become most complicated. It has not been many years since the differential diagnosis rested only between a lumbosacral or a sacro-iliac lesion as the cause of both low back pain and so-called sciatica. Many of those who studied the problem from day to day and year to year were of the impression that they understood the subject completely, only to run up against a blank wall of misunderstanding at too frequent intervals. Many orthopedic surgeons believed that the problem was simple and that it was merely a question of differentiation between lesions in the two regions, lumbosacral area versus sacro-iliac joints. The fact that there were many