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The UK is home to 7 million unpaid carers. These are people who provide care and support to an ailing or disabled family member, friend or neighbour on an ongoing basis. They represent an unpaid and often invisible workforce that saves the Government a staggering £119 billion every year – more than the Government’s entire annual NHS expenditure.

Carers are often exposed to higher than usual levels of physical and emotional stress which puts their own health at risk. Many carers help the person they care for with physical tasks, such as getting in and out of the bed, bath or chairs. In addition to this, the role of carer, especially when caring for a spouse or close family member, can create unique emotional stresses.

Over 70% the UK’s unpaid carers now suffer from back pain, and are at greater risk of developing chronic pain, which is highly disabling in a third of cases and life-long for the majority.

The national back pain charity, BackCare has chosen ‘Caring for Carers’ as this year’s BackCare Awareness Week theme (3rd – 8th of October 2016) so it seems an ideal opportunity to share some back care advice with you all.

Migraines are now listed in the top 20 disabilities by the World Health Organisation  and a survey of over 120,000 households found that four out of ten females and two out of ten males respectively will experience Migraine at some stage in their lifetime – most likely before the age of 35 and that the greatest frequency of attacks are likely to occur between the ages of 20 and 24 years in females and 15 to 19 in males. The authors reported that these findings were in accordance with previous studies. (Stewart WF, Wood C, Reed ML, Roy J, Lipton RB. Cumulative lifetime migraine incidence in women and men. Cephalalgia 2008;28:1170-1178)

Clearly this is a significant problem for many people!

Historically Headache has been divided into two main types: Migraine (Migraine with and without aura and numerous variants) and Tension-type Headache.

As the mother of a teenager, the prevalence of musculo-skeletal problems in teens is interesting to me and recently I’ve seen many more high school children presenting at my practice complaining of back pain, neck ache and headaches.  With the new term starting soon I decided to analyse the research and prevalence of problems and try to offer some solutions.

Looking back one of the first articles I wrote for Todmorden News in 2008 was about the weight of school bags and how this affected children’s backs. Research carried out by Helen Behrens, a nurse and lecturer, had shown that 30% of children carried schoolbags weighing over 10% of their bodyweight. She reported that this placed unnecessary stress on the growing adolescent spine that, later in life, could be the cause of back pain.  I believe that this is still a significant problem – neither of our local high schools have lockers for the students to use meaning that children carry heavy loads not only to and from school but throughout the school day including all their books for each day plus any PE kit, instruments for music lessons and ingredients for food technology.

We all lead hectic and busy lifestyles; working long hours, family commitments, chores (or what I like to refer to as ‘adulting’), as well as  the need to maintain a social life. Sound familiar? You’re not alone… these are all common barriers to exercise that lead us to convince ourselves that we are “too busy” for exercise, something which I have also been guilty of. The reality is, however, that we are not too busy, we just don’t prioritise it as highly as other events in our diary. We all make time for things that we really want to do, right? So here are some tips to help overcome these barriers: