Three out of four Canadian adults experience some form of back or neck discomfort at some point in their lives. These people represent a large and lucrative market for unscrupulous and less-skilled practitioners, of which there are too many in the medical, rehabilitative, insurance and pharmacological fields.

There was a time when jobs that inflicted vibrations on the body — long-haul truck driving and construction work, for instance — were considered bad for the back. But new research out of the University of Calgary suggests that certain vibrations may in fact help alleviate chronic back pain.