Does anxiety give rise to back problems?
One of my patients once experienced the first agonising pain in his back when he read a letter informing him that one of his companies had gone bust. Does anxiety bring on back pain, he was keen to know? What is the connection? It is my belief that almost always, if and only if a patient has an underlying back problem, then states of anxiety, tension, fright and excitement can indeed be among the factors which produce pain. In some cases, they may even seem to be the only factors involved. To explain my point I would like to consider the subject in some detail. Although man has been variously civilised for probably twelve thousand years, the fact remains that most of the physiological functions of the body still relate entirely to the primitive state. In those early times, anxiety was generally linked with physical danger, resulting in the subjective sensation which we call fright. This activates a special push-button mechanism called the sympathetic nervous system, which is associated
