My father never hurt his back in his life, he was active and healthy. Now, his doctor is telling him that his severe back pain is being caused by dying discs. What does that mean?

The back, the spinal cord and all the discs that support it, takes on a tremendous load every day. Many people do injure their back, sometimes in the seemingly most innocent and unexpected way. However, you don’t always have to injure your back to have pain. Sometimes, the discs begin to degenerate for other reasons, such as arthritis.

To say that the discs are dying does sound shocking. What actually happens is the discs can begin to degenerate and then the can’t support the weight of the body and help you move as your back should let you.

In order to see if your father has degenerating discs, the best test is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which allows doctors to see the color of the center, or nuclei, of the disc. If the center is white, the disc is healthy. If it’s gray, it is moderately degenerating, and if it’s black, it’s severely degenerated.