Oh, My Aching Back!

Reported October 2006

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- A simple everyday move moved Timothy Pickens to unimaginable pain.

"I reached down to touch the computer mouse and shut it off, and I just tipped myself a little bit to reach down and it just grabbed," Pickens says. Now he's working to get his back back in shape.

Pickens is one of 400,000 people living with spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal column. But for many, years of misdiagnosis keeps them in pain. Back pain is one of the most common medical complaints, but it can be one of the hardest to diagnose.

Carolyn Koski has lived with back pain her entire life. "Numbness, balance, fatigue, dizziness," she says. Doctors diagnosed her with spinal stenosis, but physiatrist Andrew Haig used an EMG to reveal the real problem -- nerve disease.

MRIs are what most doctors use to look at your spine, but an MRI scan can only give a picture of the nerve. "It's kinda like looking at a photograph of a car to see if it has dents," Dr. Haig, M.D., of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, tells Ivanhoe.

What an MRI doesn't show is pain.

An old test is breaking new ground when it comes to finding out what's hurting your back. An EMG records the electrical activity of muscles and can actually test nerve function and find out if anything hurts.

"It's more like putting the key in the engine to see if the car works or not. There are lots of dented cars that work just fine," Dr. Haig says.

Dr. Haig believes more doctors are not using EMG to test for back pain because the results are harder to read and takes more time to diagnose.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Andrew Haig, M.D.
Associate Professor
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Orthopedic Surgery
The University of Michigan
(734) 763-4300
andyhaig@med.umich.edu

Ben Stein
American Institute of Physics
for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine
(301) 209-3088
bstein@aip.org

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