Word: lumbar
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...years ago, it was the $5,000 barbecue grill. These days it takes a luxury mower if you want to be a backyard baron. Home-owners are dumping their old, bone-rattling lawn-and-garden cutters and trading up to fancy models with brawny engines, lumbar-supporting seats and the now obligatory beverage caddy. "A lot of people buy a large lawn tractor and think they're going to till the soil and plant a big garden, but many never do," says a senior executive for a major mowermaker. "They use it to cut grass. Buying these minitractors...
...button), but then it does a pretty nifty trick of its own, flipping over to become an 80in. foam-mattress bed. It's the latest weapon in the seat wars airlines are waging for coveted business-class passengers. Each of the aisle-only chairs comes with a customizable lumbar support--and an ottoman, just in case you need to conduct an onboard staff meeting or order up an in-flight beauty-therapy treatment. Virgin is spending about $81 million to retrofit its planes this summer through next fall in an effort to land the Concorde crowd...
...world on their shoulders--in overstuffed, spine-compressing backpacks. Nike has just introduced the BioKNX load-management system--O.K., an ergonomic book bag--which helps redistribute the weight of all those texts. It has wide, padded straps, "air pods" that look like bubble wrap--to protect the lumbar region--and a padded waist belt that shifts weight from the spine to the hips. A molded plastic panel inside the pack supports the spine...
...study showed both professional and amateur golfers generating "peak spinal compression loads" of 6,000 newtons (a measure of gravitational force). That's the equivalent of eight times an individual's standing body weight. These back-crunching levels are "close to the known failure loads associated with lumbar intervertebral joints," concludes Thomas P. Headman, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Southern California...
...respiratory and cardiovascular systems. The FDA points out, however, that in the new clinical trials with more than 1,400 patients, anaphylaxis occurred in only 1% of cases, and of these just two patients died. The mortality rate of .14% for chymopapain is about the same as that for lumbar disc surgery. Still, surgeons are cautioning patients that chymopapain is a last-ditch therapy short of surgery. In 95% of the millions of patients with herniated discs, the pain can be relieved by bed rest and aspirin...