"Patients have a poor understanding of back pain and physicians are terrible at explaining the trouble." Early in my career as a spine surgeon, I realized two things:  Patients have a poor understanding of back pain and physicians are terrible at explaining the trouble.  Both problems arise first from the fact that back pain is so common that everyone is an “expert” with a different idea of what is wrong and second because doctors treat back pain as a disease and not as the natural human condition it is.  This focus emphasizes a search for pathology, subjecting patients to frightening…