The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs - Bob King - #1098

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Most people think that back pain, and low energy, and bad posture are discipline problems.
You think that they're design problems. Why is that?

**Bob King** (0:10)
Yeah, very interesting. Well, if you look at the data on the population of people around the world, certainly people in the United States, a significant percent of adults in America, for example, have chronic or repeated back pain.
It's a huge problem. And as you get older, it gets worse and worse. I think it's clear if you look at what people do day to day, you can see quite clearly that there's a cause and effect there.

**Chris Williamson** (0:39)
What's the evidence around sitting and back pain?

**Bob King** (0:44)
You can look at sitting postures. The most interesting thing about that is you look at postures when people sit.
I study people sitting. I think it's quite interesting. There's data on this too. But if you were to look anywhere in buildings here in Austin or buildings in Tokyo or Singapore, anywhere, you would see people sitting at their desk, hunched over their desk, their back, probably not even touching the back of their chair, keying on their computer for hours and hours on end. That's how people sit. I even, at one point, I needed a slide for my deck. So of someone sitting in that posture. So I Googled photo of person working on a computer or something like that. And I got hundreds of pictures. They were all essentially identical. People hunched over their decks.

**Chris Williamson** (1:30)
The old C-spine.

**Bob King** (1:32)
Your spine is now curved forward, which is incredibly unhealthy. And what happens when you lean forward like that is you put more stress on your spine. But interestingly also, your vertebrae is curved forward. So each vertebrae comes together on one side and opens up on the other. On one side, it's putting pressure on your disc, and the other side, it's opening up the disc.
I can't imagine, in fact, I'm pretty sure there's, aside from lifting very heavy weights, it's probably nothing worse for your back than doing that. And that's how everyone sits.

**Chris Williamson** (2:07)
Do you know Dr. Stu McGill? Do you know who he is?

**Bob King** (2:10)
No, no.

**Chris Williamson** (2:10)
Back mechanic. So he is the world's number one lower back pain doctor. And I had a ton of back pain 2017, 2018
So 2019, after I brought him on the podcast, I flew to Gravenhurst, which is two hours north of Toronto. So I landed in Toronto on my own, rented a car from Toronto Airport, drove two hours north to Gravenhurst to see this guy.

**Bob King** (2:32)
And your back was killing you by the time you started.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
It wasn't assisted at all. And I get there and this is sort of crazy wizard of the lower back that I went to go and see with huge moustache. It looks like Santa Claus on his off day. And he said, I don't take private clients. I'm sort of full with all of this stuff. But if you come out with me and we go fishing and if you catch a fish, then I'll do your entire consult. He's quite playful like that. He's the best. He's the absolute best. And I love that guy. But I remember I was sat with him morning after we'd been together and we were becoming really good friends.
He gets a phone call and it was a woman. I don't know how she'd got his number. Maybe somebody had passed her on. And this woman said, I'm in so much chronic pain for my lower back, that I want to take my own life or I want to find a way to end my life. And I'm thinking about doing it tomorrow. And I watched this guy who I just met and was dealing with me, a young dude that had done too much CrossFit. And listen to him sort of talk this person back off the ledge of there are a ton of different interventions, do not get surgery, you don't need to do this, you don't need to do that. But this person was, oh, that was it, sorry, no.
They wanted to do that and the only solution they could think of was surgery. But the outcomes for lower back surgery are usually worse. People go to a lower baseline afterwards because the complications, the potential complications. This is what happened with Ronnie Coleman, if you know him, Mr. Olympia, big, huge eight-time Mr. Olympia guy. And now he walks with crutches. I think he said his pain day-to-day is regularly a nine out of 10, and he's on the maximum legal dose for Percocet or some sort of other opioid.