Carrying a heavy backpack may make you shrink
The pain starts in middle school. A 2010 study in the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which studied a small test group of children around the age of 11, found that the constant weight of the bag was actually causing spinal cords to compress and cause significant back pain. Those bags were on the lighter side of the average: only 26 pounds. It gets a lot worse with the average bag weight.
So funny story, when I was about 22 (I’m 26 now) I worked at a gym and we did this promotion thing that involved a local chiropractor doing the little spine scan you see above for free to whoever wanted one. So I was like well, might as well.
Anyway, turns out my spine is pretty messed up and I lean a little to one side like the picture. Guess which side? To the right. Why? Because that’s the shoulder I carried my 20-30lbs backpack on for the 7 years of middle and high school.
The chiropractor just looked at me and gave me this knowing, slightly frustrated look and said something like, “Yeah, we’re starting to see this a lot in people your age.”
No one believed me but it’s real!!!
It’s almost as if humans are fleshy and pliable.