Back injuries have been the bane of industry for decades. They are the source of high dollar claims, significant lost workdays, and can instantaneously ruin one's quality of life forever.
Corporate America, despite many attempts, has not been able to significantly reduce the frequency or severity of back injuries to any desired degree. Back injuries (and other sprain/strain injuries) continue to cost Corporate America lost production and billions of dollars of lost profits every year.
There have been many attempts to mitigate this problem. Back belts, ergonomics, and training have been tried. Back belts did not achieve the desired effect, ergonomic interventions have helped mechanize many lift tasks, but does not seem to be the complete answer, and training, well what about training?
We have all heard that training people on how to use their bodies correctly does not yield results. Many of us have witnessed this first hand. But how can that be? We can teach a 12 year old girl to do a back flip on a balance beam that is four inches wide and four feet of the ground; we can teach a 4 year old how to swim; we can teach a monkey to jump rope; and even I learned how to eat Chinese food with chopsticks; yet we have not been able to teach willing adults how to lift a box correctly.
In the mid 1990's, based on a study conducted, it was pronounced by a well-known medical journal that back training does not work!
Does this make sense? Well it didn't to me. What then are we missing?
We have employers not wanting employees to be injured. We have employees not wanting to become injured. No conflict of purpose there.
We can train athletes of any age to do and repeatedly perform tremendous physical feats, yet responsible workers are being labeled as untrainable?
I had the good fortune of meeting the doctor who conducted the previous mentioned study and who concluded that training does not work to reduce sprain/strain injuries. The thought process was to discover what methodology was used and how this conclusion came to be.
