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Wellness Wednesday for September 27, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I typically lift ~30 pounds frequently, up to hundreds of times a day, and sometimes at awkward angles. Occasionally lift more than 50 lbs, but always with proper form. It's almost certainly not bad enough to be a slipped disc, but repetitive stress is likely. I'm trying to fix it on my own before I try a doctor, not out of financial concerns but just because I dislike dealing with doctors. If I don't see fairly rapid improvement I'll see a doctor.

Out of curiosity, why do you suggest a doctor? My priors are that they would either recommend what I'm already doing, or recommend a medical intervention that would arguably be worse than what I'm dealing with (like back surgery). Is that inaccurate? It took 15+ years for the pain to get to that point, aggravated by a NEET phase where I was sitting in a slouched chair aggravating back pain for 14 hours a day and in bed the other 10. Working through pain would be better than enforced sloth.

The additional context you provided makes an outright slipped disc somewhat less unlikely, but it's perfectly possible that you have a slower/progressive degenerative disc disease.

Shooting pain of the kind you described, especially going from the back to your legs, is a very common presentation of the same. It strongly suggests pressure or damage on some nerve or the other.

But if it's cheaper for you, see a physiotherapist first, or if your exercise plan works out. If it makes a difference, I am a doctor myself, but this isn't my speciality.