Acknowledgment of the sources Esther Gokhale used in developing her theories on back pain, chronic back pain, and lower right back pain can be found throughout this article. One of those sources include the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique which are part of the physiotherapy methods. Another one of Esther's sources is the work of Noelle Perez-Christiaens, an anthropologist.
A high percentage of Americans are going to experience back issues that include chronic back pain at some point in their lifetime. Out of those there will be a handful that will never find help in relieving their back pain, with it only getting worse as time goes on. Esther Gokhale, is an acupuncturist in Palo Alto, California, she traveled the world studying back pain in different cultures.
Esther researched how different cultures stood up, sit, walked and in general what their posture was like. Esther observed this in a tribe in Central India that had never had back issues at all. There were no signs of degeneration of the discs in their back as they aged, or there was very little.
Esther Gokhale began to have issues with her own back around twenty years ago after giving birth to her first born. Through sleepless nights and excruciating pain ultimately discovering it was a herniated disc. She had surgery to correct the problem only for it to come back the following year. She refused to have another back surgery and decided to find a way to fix it permanently.
She decided to travel and see for herself what the cultures that had very little back problems or never had lower right back pains. So Esther visited the different cultures of the world over the ten years that followed. She spent time with cultures that didn't know anything about our modern lifestyle, visiting remote villages in West Africa, small fishing towns in Portugal, and far into the mountains in Ecuador.
Throughout her travels Esther even visited cultures where the children had never seen a person outside their community before. She gathered research, taking pictures and videos of those carrying buckets on top of their heads, others bending over collecting firewood, and those that sit on the hard ground hours at a time weaving, and women who spend hours bending over gathering chestnuts. It looks like they would be having lower right back pain from all that they do.
Collecting her thoughts, trying to figure out what it was all of these people had or was doing differently than us. These cultures spent all the hours in a day stooping, bending, reaching, and stretching, standing, and walking, but they did not have any issues with their back hurting, not ever. What was it that they had in common with one another? It dawned on her, they all had the same shape of their spinal column, and all of them had a regal posture, straight and tall.
Esther Gokhale has since given classes to Google, Facebook and even companies located throughout the country. Esther Gokhale has become known in Silicon Valley as the posture guru since studying the postures of other these other cultures and pinpointing their habits.