Back to Sex! ( or Sex to Back! )

         Reading the science and technology section  in a several weeks old copy of  'The Economist' lately, I came across an interesting  study completed at the University of Waterloo,  just down  the  road from me.  Waterloo University has been researching positions for sexual intercourse that work best for different kinds of back pain.  They are offering doctors hard evidence (sic) to base their recommendations to patients upon.  The research documents the way the spine moves during sex and postulates that certain positions are better than others.  They tracked how ten couples' spines moved in five different sex positions.  They created a set of guidelines based on which movements cause pain.  There appears to be two components of the study, one studying males and the other studying female positional distress.   Younger folk are usually bothered most by flexion movements, while older people tend to be more stressed by extension.  They used infra-red motion cameras to track the movements for twenty seconds of sex in each position.  They describe the positions studied.  Subsequently., the full range of their back movements were calculated to establish their maximum range of movement.
        The research, published in 'Spine' will be developed into a fuller guide to sexual positions. The team plans to study other positions.
         What a shame that in my years in Academe if I had made a proposal like this it would have been greeted by hoots of laughter.  Either that or I would have been fired  - though that may have been impossible, since I was tenured!!
          Let me know if you want to hear more about how this develops.