You might be married or single, in love or divorced. But if you’re approaching middle age, already there or beyond it, your back is probably your significant other.
Back pain is the second most common medical complaint in America, after the cold: 80 percent of the population encounters it between ages 25 and 40, a Public Health Service study has found. It is also poised to become big business.
Back-care products for the home are rapidly gaining a new national profile. Office ergonomics was the first frontier for back-friendly products. Now, products for living rooms, home offices and bedrooms – from posture-correcting recliners to hand-held massage devices to spine-stretchers like inversion tables and exercise balls – are creating a healthy new mainstream market niche among Baby Boomers who are being literally hit in the back by age.
Frustration with widely advised traditional medical solutions like orthopedic surgery or muscle-relaxing drugs has created a growing industry of self-care.
“Most of the products are para-science,” said Dr. Alex Simotas, a New York physiatrist, or medical doctor specializing in musculoskeletal problems. “But it’s an industry feeding on an incredible demand – a huge population of people with back pain, with no answers.”
The country’s largest back-care products franchise, Relax the Back, opened its 100th store in September. Back pain has arrived as a lifestyle.
From a retailer’s point of view, the situation couldn’t be sweeter, a meeting of New Age and old age. With back care costing an estimated $60 billion annually in direct medical costs and indirect costs like work loss and compensation, back-savvy products have the glow of sales health.
“At the end of the day, you just come home and turn yourself upside down for five minutes,” Kristie Zea, a film production designer, said of the inversion swing she uses, which she purchased by mail from Gravity Plus, a back-care-products company with headquarters in La Jolla, Calif.
The harnesslike swing, which retails for $169, suspends and inverts the user, rather like a parachute harness caught upside down in a tree. Zea, who has recurrent lower back pain, saw the swing being used at a yoga class.
Liz Chrystea, who was interviewed as two staff members clamped her ankles in place and then slowly upended her on the inversion table she was trying at the New York Relax the Back store, said of her back odyssey: “I’ve spent $1,000 on a Japanese mattress. I have a pair of inversion boots, where you hang from a pole, but I got a little frightened.”
Medical authorities find little agreement on the causes of most chronic lower back pain and consequently offer few satisfactory answers. “The biggest problem with back pain is, what’s the cause of back pain?” said Dr. Michael Sinel, an orthopedic surgeon with the Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles. “You could see 20 specialists and get 19 answers.”
This leaves the field wide open for answers of any kind – and ripe for retailers. In the new marketplace of nonmedical solutions, if something feels right or beneficial, then aching Everyman can walk in off the street, try it and buy it. Or order it by mail, or find it on the Web. Does it work? You be the judge.
