A man with lots of backbone
Sunday June 29 2003
None of these sitting positions is what I would have thought of as ideal for my health, but Colm insists that they are not only not contributing to the health of my spine, they are actively causing it to deteriorate. He is prepared to back up this alarming news (if you'll pardon the pun).
As soon as I walk into his shop, on Exchequer Street in Dublin, he asks me to sit in a specially designed chair to see if I notice anything different. And indeed I do notice that I am sitting upright, with my back supported, unlike the way I normally sit. In a chair like that, he says, I would be able to write for eight or ten hours, without any discomfort. He knows because he wrote a novel in one.
The chair is one of his own designs and it is possible to have a chair designed especially to suit the contours of your own spine, which is what Colm does for a living. On the internet, if you enter the words 'back-pain relief', you will find The Back Shop listed at number six, out of millions of entries. Every spine is as unique as the human fingerprint, and because of this, Colm has constructed an ingenious machine which measures the exact proportions of his customers' backs.
While seated in the measuring chair, a series of bars are slotted into place along the vertebrae, charting the exact curve so that the chair will be exactly right for you. And because sitting with bad posture is the main cause of back pain, getting the right chair for home and for work, even for the car, can, according to Colm, alleviate most back pain.
He speaks from experience. He first began to suffer back trouble as a teenager. He was playing rugby when he felt a knee being planted in the small of his back by another boy. He did nothing about the injury and continued to play, but his back was always niggling at him. Until one day, 25 years ago, when he was working at the Irish Times and there was a telephone call. He stood up to walk to the phone, ten paces away, took two steps and hit the floor. He had ruptured a lumbar disc and was in dire trouble.
Into the ambulance he was bundled and off to hospital. At the hospital, he made what he says was the wisest decision ever made by man, which was not to have the recommended operation. His wife, who was visiting when he made the decision, fetched his clothes and said, 'Let's go home.'
Colm was in excruciating pain, but he was adamant that he didn't want the operation. "There was a guy beside me in the ward, he was a cop and he was after having an operation. When he came back, he said that the pain was worse than when he went in. So I said 'I'm not having this. I'm getting out of here!'"
Another factor that influenced his decision was the surgeon who told him to get out of bed and bend and touch his toes. Which was something that he had never been able to do. He had never even been able to touch his knees.
The decision to take charge of his own treatment was one he never regretted. In 25 years, he says, he has never come across one successful back operation.
"Thinking logically, I worked out that if I sat with perfect posture, I could eliminate the problem. And I did." He began to experiment, making chairs which could totally support his spine - and they worked. He has managed to eliminate his own back pain and is able to play golf and live a normal life.
But he is baffled, he says, by the illogical way in which most people respond to the problem.
"Eighty per cent of the world's population suffers from back pain at some time or other. The only people that I know of who don't suffer from back pain are the Australian Aboriginals because they don't sit, they squat.
"But what do people do about it? Continue to sit with bad posture! I would go so far as to say that 95 per cent of people who sit in offices all day are sitting with bad posture. Most people arrange their bodies around their work, whereas they should be doing it the other way around."
The chairs that Colm designs are being sold all over the world, but one of his first clients was the Eastern Health Board, which approached him to make a chair for a 42-year-old quadroplegic in Chapelizod.
"They pleaded with me to come out and have a look. The guy had been lying on the ground for 40 years. I had a crude measuring system at that stage - I hadn't developed the one I have now - but they got him sitting up and I measured him and, two months later, I delivered the chair. And when I went back, he was able to sit up for the first time in 40 years."
Aside from being an ingenious inventor of back chairs, Colm has a secret life as a novelist. Neither of his novels has been published yet, but he outlines the plot of one of them, a fascinating and thoroughly researched story about how a gang successfully forges US dollars with the intention of dumping them all over the country and messing with the economy.
I am not allowed to reveal just how they go about forging the money but Colm assures me that having investigated it with the same painstaking attention to detail that he applies to back pain, his method is foolproof.
"I know a lot about counterfeiting," he says. "And I spent four years researching this book. I went to the Central Bank and I spoke to someone who held a very senior position there and told him what I was doing and he gave me a dozen reasons why it couldn't be done. I acted on each one and went back several months later and I had overcome each of the obstacles. So he gave me some more reasons. And I figured them out." He smiles, amusedly.
"I have two philosophies in life," he says, as I'm leaving with my new car seat. "One of them is, if something works, leave it alone. The other one is, I can do anything I want!"
The Back Shop, 32 Exchequer St, Dublin 2. Tel: (01) 671 4215. www.back-shop.com
- Victoria Mary Clarke
