Four weeks ago, Tom Hayes, 58, awoke in his hotel bed with his lower back in agony. “It was pain I’ve never experienced,” says Tom, a TV producer, who was working in Turkey at the time. “I’ve broken my leg and shattered my ankle in 10 places before and that wasn’t half as bad. This pain was so much more extreme. I couldn’t work out how to get out of bed and had to call a colleague a few doors down to help me.”

Tom went straight to hospital where he learnt that what he was experiencing was a slipped, or “herniated”, disc. “Knowing that it was just a really common, boring injury took the panic away,” he says. “Until that point, I think I was in too much pain to be rational and really had no idea what it could be.” A month on, back home and off pain killers, he’s feeling only “mild discomfor

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