Who's writing this

I've lived with structural spinal problems for over fifty years. Not as a case study — as the person on the bathroom floor at two in the morning working out whether they can reach the door handle. I know what the third day feels like, and the specific panic of not knowing whether this is the episode that doesn't resolve.

For more than twenty years I worked clinically with people in acute and chronic spinal pain. Most of what's on this site came out of the overlap between those two things: what the research says, what I watched actually work in a room with someone who couldn't stand up, and what I'd tried on myself first.

Why this site exists

Search for back spasm relief in the middle of one and you get pages of stretches. Stretching an acute spasm is the worst available option and it's the top result everywhere. Underneath that, mostly anonymous content, medically reviewed by someone who has never had one.

I wanted one page that tells you the first three things to do, written by someone who has been there, before you've even had to think about it. That's the home page. The full ten-day recovery is free too — it's a download rather than a wall of text, because that's what actually works at two in the morning.

What I'm not

I'm not a physician and nothing here is a diagnosis or a prescription. I can't examine you, I don't know your history, and general education is a poor substitute for someone putting hands on your spine. If anything on the warning signs list applies to you, go and be seen — that instruction is not negotiable and it's why it sits at the top of the site rather than the bottom.

The Backhealer Method

The longer-term work I teach runs on one principle: lengthen the front, strengthen the back. Most people in recurring back pain are tight through the anterior chain — hip flexors, psoas, diaphragm, abdominal wall — and their spine pays for it. The method combines controlled breathing, myofascial release of the front body, and a staged movement progression, in that order. Front body first, back body last.

That work lives at backpainexposed.com. This site is only about the emergency.

Books

• Sciatica Secrets — the first of the Back Pain Exposed series. Nerve pain patterns, and which positions and movements help against which ones make it worse. (paid link)
• The 90-Day Reset Journal — daily tracking to find your own triggers, which is the part nobody else can do for you. (paid link)

How this site is written

Everything here is reviewed against published guidance on acute low back pain — NICE, StatPearls, the emergency medicine red-flag literature and others, all listed on the references page. Where the evidence is genuinely uncertain I say so rather than picking a side and sounding confident. Pages carry a last-reviewed date and I update them rather than quietly rewriting history.