Ok I've read through all the posts as of (about) the time of this post.

I've had a lot of non-professional experience with personal back pain and with fixing the back pain of others. This is what I've found but your mileage will almost certainly vary because back problems are usually very particular. That said this might help suffers with a similar cause.

In my experience there are two kinds of back problems. These are a) chronic, very bad problems and b) run of the mill everyone's everyday back and neck problems. I've had both and I've treated a lot of the latter. * Do not follow any of the techniques discussed in this post without first consulting a qualified professional. *

These are two very different situations. Let's start with the every day stuff because that's by far what most people experience.

This involves a lot of neck and arm pain (and lower arm repetitive strain injury) caused (mostly) by computer mousing. It also includes the cliched lower back pain that lasts for a few days and then generally "goes away".

These kinds of pains can almost always be fixed within 5 to 10 minutes (yes I know this sounds insane if you've had it for a few years or more) with the right kind of massage (not too hard but not too light) in the right places.

For neck pain the massage points are almost always vertically on the shoulders about half way between the neck and the shoulder and horizontally between the spine the shoulder blade about 2/3rds of the way down shoulder blade. DO NOT MASSAGE THE NECK AT ALL. Even though that's where the pain seems to be. It's a referred pain.

For shoulder/arm pain the massage points almost always start in shoulder blade (a few different usual suspects) and then follow that down to just below the elbow and then, if it's really bad -- just above the wrist or in the hand itself).

Garden variety lower back pain can very often be alleviated with massage points on the pelvic girdle. These are tricky to find but very effective. Five minutes of the right pressure in the right place can make almost all the pain "go away".

So can you go to a massage therapist and get these effective treatments? My sense of it is, very rarely. Usually their touch is too light to elicit the full therapeutic response. Yes you'll feel a bit better but it won't feel fully recovered in a handful of sessions. You'll have to shop around the get the real deal. My guess is that most therapists are unwilling to cause the required amount of pain in their massage technique, though that is just speculation on my part.

So, moving on to the second category, real bad chronic damage. In my personal experience it's likely that discs or cartilage was damaged. Massage will not fix injuries like this. Furthermore that kind of tissue has a poor blood supply so it takes a long time to heal properly. In my case it was three years. And definitely not 5-10 minutes as described above.

In this kind of situation, one of the most important things to know is that the further damage you do today will not be felt until tomorrow. So suppose you fall off your bike and cause this kind of serious damage and after 3 months you feel great so you jump on your bike and ride to work. It's all good until the next day when you start to feel spasms return to your back. Why didn't they tell you about this? I don't know but in my case they never did.

The only strategy here is to resign yourself to a long recovery, try to keep limber in the unaffected joints and re-engage the damaged area very carefully and slowly. Too slow is not good, too fast is not good. Knowing the difference is almost impossible. If anyone knows a fool proof way to manage this situation, this side of a team of specialists, I'm all ears.