The Back That Broke Everything

On 2 August 1934, two Boston surgeons published six pages that changed how doctors, and then everybody else, talked about bad backs. I checked the page numbers: 210 to 215 of volume 211. They were right about sciatica. The trouble came afterwards, when the rest of us stretched their paper over every aching back, and then the scanners found the same bulges in people who felt fine. I wrote this for the people that story still reaches, lying on the carpet with a phone. I am not a doctor or a physiotherapist. I build AI software, I work long days at a laptop, and my part is the reading. I would rather have handed you a promise and a timetable, because that is what sells books. Instead there is a chapter called What Nobody Knows.