Safety

Straight-back posture is good posture-Not

OSHA Healthcare Connection, December 12, 2006

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Your mother and other disciplinarian archetypes may have been wrong about the benefits of sitting up straight.

A Canadian study used magnetic resonance imaging to measure spinal angles and spinal disk height and movement for three sitting positions on 22 healthy volunteers with no history of back pain or surgery. The sitting positions were: a slouching position, in which the body is hunched forward; an upright 90-degree sitting position; and a relaxed position where the patient reclines backward 135 degrees while the feet remain on the floor.

"A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal," said Waseem Amir Bashir, M.B.Ch.B., F.R.C.R., the study's author and clinical fellow in the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Alberta Hospital, Canada. "

The study, conducted at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland, was presented in November at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.



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