Should You Tell Your Parents to Stop Wearing Their Back Brace?

If you've noticed a back brace wrapped around your parent's waist

"Mom, they say if you keep wearing that, your back muscles get weak."

Many of you have probably said this when visiting home for the holidays. And your mother answers:

"I can't walk without it."

Among the older patients who come to our clinic from Hwanggeum-dong and nearby, there are a great many who have worn a back brace for years. And just as often, we hear this worry from their children.

What we often hear

• "My mother has been wearing a back brace for years."
• "I don't know whether to tell her to take it off or just leave it."
• "She says she can't walk without it."

We've had that same worry for a long time

The idea is that since the brace does the muscles' job for them, the muscles get lazy. When you hear it, it sounds convincing.

So I looked up the research myself. The results were different from what I expected.

There was no evidence that back braces weaken muscles

There's an analysis that pooled 35 studies on how lumbar supports affect the trunk muscles.

• Some studies found no change in muscle strength
• Some even found it got stronger
• Only one study found it decreased

In a study where people wore a back brace 7 hours a day for 4 weeks and the thickness of the deep abdominal and back muscles was then measured by ultrasound, nothing had changed either.

So the claim that "a back brace makes your back muscles weak" isn't supported by research so far.

But we need to add something honestly

Most of these studies looked at wearing a brace for a few weeks. There's little research that has followed people for a long time who wear one for years, like your mother.

So it's hard to flatly say "it's fine," either.

The accurate conclusion is this:

There's no evidence that it weakens the muscles, but there isn't enough evidence yet that wearing one for years is safe, either.

So how should you look at it?

Rather than the brace itself, I look at two things.

One: does your parent walk with the brace on, or walk less because they lean on it?

This is the key.

If you take the brace away from someone who can only walk with it, they'll walk less. For older people, walking less is a far more direct risk than the brace.

In fact, in people whose legs go numb while walking so they have to rest, there are studies showing that walking distance increased when they wore a brace.

If the brace keeps them walking, it's on their side.

On the other hand, if they're leaning on the brace and walking less and less, that's not a brace problem but a problem of direction.

Two: is the brace hiding something?

This is even more important.

Because the brace makes things bearable, things can be missed while tests are put off.

If an older person has any of the following, they shouldn't just get by with a brace:

• Back pain that started after a fall (if their bones are weak, first check that nothing is broken)
• A feeling of weakness in the legs
• A noticeable drop in how far they can walk
• Changes in bladder or bowel habits
• Pain at night that continues even when lying down

If there's even one, put the brace question aside. Getting checked comes first.

Here's how we look at it

First, we ask about the history. Since when, how many hours a day, at what times they wear it, and how it feels when they take it off. We won't make them take it off no matter what, and we won't tell them to keep wearing it no matter what.

Next, we check their condition. We use a posture analysis to see where the body is misaligned, and if needed, we check the spine with imaging in partnership with the radiology clinic on the 2nd floor of the same building. What the brace means changes completely depending on whether the spine has narrowed, something is broken, or it's simply age-related wear.

And we build strength to take the brace's place. We use Chuna (Korean manual therapy) to correct misalignment and acupuncture and pharmacopuncture to deal with pain, and we move toward building, little by little, the strength they had been getting from the brace.

We don't tell them not to walk. Together, we work out how much and how they'll walk.

What we're aiming for

A morning when they lift their grandchild without a brace. Or, even if that isn't possible, an afternoon when they put on the brace and walk to the market and back again today.

Either way, it's a daily life in which your parent keeps walking.

Whether a brace is needed, and for how long, varies from person to person depending on the condition of the spine, bone strength and muscle strength.

When you visit your parents this weekend, instead of saying "take that off," please ask them this:

"How far can you walk when you wear it?"

That answer is the starting point.

For questions or appointments, message us in English through the messenger at the bottom right of the page, or call +82-53-716-1175.

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We've summarized the 35 original studies, along with the studies on walking distance in spinal stenosis, in the director's column Does wearing a back brace for a long time weaken your muscles?.