Backache is a malady from which millions of individuals suffer annually, and the cause of it is often difficult to determine as it may be something as simple as not drinking sufficient water often enough.
Approximately 70% of the human body is water – we lose most of this throughout the day from normal bodily functions such as perspiring, breathing, and urinating. This is a problem because without the correct balance of fluids in the body it cannot function optimally and dehydration sets in.
Dehydration affects every cell in the human body because every cell needs water to survive and perform vital functions. When the body is starved of water, the brain ceases to function at its peak; liver-function is impaired; the skin gets dry and wrinkled; kidney function is impaired; mucous membranes get dried out; and the blood thickens, which means your heart has to work harder to transport oxygen and nutrients to all the cells in your body.
It is vital that you do drink water regularly to replace lost body fluids because your body cannot store water. One of the other side-effects of dehydration is backache, which occurs because your spine consists of vertebrae between which is a disc that functions as a shock absorber. Each of these discs is made up of two halves; one half is a tough flexible ring filled with a gelatinous substance called the nucleus pulposis, and the other half mainly consists of water.
We spend most of the day upright, and during this time water is slowly squeezed out of the discs as we go about our daily business – when the body is horizontal at night, the spine is supine, which allows the discs to be rehydrated.
A fun fact is that when we go to bed at night we are around 1 to 1.5 centimetres shorter than we are when we wake up in the morning due to the daily dehydration and nightly rehydration. Dehydration is also the reason why older people, who do not feel thirst and therefore walk around dehydrated most of the time, usually end up bent over and shorter.
When our water levels are inadequate and the discs cannot rehydrate, the entire disc becomes compromised and unable to support its share of the load, resulting in pain, herniation, ruptures, and swelling, ultimately causing excruciating back pain.
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