Sighs of "Oh, my aching back," and catalogues with office chairs that promise perfect posture and back pain banishment are commonplace in a nation where many suffer from back pain - a third of the unlucky chosen experiencing chronic pain, according to Gallup. There are cultures where back pain in basically nonexistent and discs don't degenerate with age as they do in America, according to a previous study.
Esther Gokhale, an acupuncturist in Palo Alto, Calif., started her journey studying cultures with low rates of back pain after having her first child about 20 years ago, according to NPR. "I had excruciating pain. I couldn't sleep at night," she said. "I was walking around the block every two hours. I was just crippled."
Gokhale had surgery to fix a herniated disc, but after a year, she had the same problem. "They wanted to do another back surgery. You don't want to make a habit out of back surgery," Gokhale said.
Since Western medicine wasn't helping, Gokhale started brainstorming. It hit her: "Go to populations where they don't have these huge problems and see what they're doing."
