- Welfare bill for people with back problems alone has tripled in past two decades
Back and neck problems fuelled by rising obesity and remote working are driving a major health crisis, experts have warned.
Almost a million workers in Britain suffer from back or neck ailments, leaving them too sick to do their jobs, official data has shown.
Health leaders have attributed this to work-from-home culture.
The welfare bill for people with back problems alone has tripled in the past two decades to £1.4billion a year, analysis reveals.
And specialists warned that sufferers are turning up to A&E ‘desperately looking for help’.
In most cases the problems may be improved or resolved with physiotherapy assessment, advice and rehabilitation.
But thousands of patients are stuck on waiting lists due to a shortage of physiotherapy specialists in the NHS.
Some in severe pain have been forced to wait so long that they are developing other health conditions such as depression.
Professor Kamila Hawthorne, of the Royal College of GPs, warned that back pain has become ‘an all too common condition’.
‘People are working for longer, and as they do they are living with multiple chronic conditions,’ she told The Guardian.
‘There is evidence that links lower back pain and obesity.
New ways of working, often without the right equipment, and people waiting too long before seeking treatment could also be factors,’ she said.
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Xantha Leatham
