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It should come as no surprise that pretty much anyone can 'get' a disc bulge.

Any human who moves around on the planet has to relate to gravity, and gravity is, at the end of the day, what will wear on us all. We have a support structure that is in place to help us keep from collapsing under our own weight, in fact. It's our skeleton.

In some respects, each individual is composed of a few systems, operated by the brain. Systems like special senses, ie. vision, hearing, smell, etc that enable us to interact with our environment. The nervous system that allows us to interact with ourselves. A skeleton that is the core framework of our body. Systems like the muscular system that move us around and interact with the world at large. Arms made of nerves, muscles and bone that allow us to touch things, and to move things around. Legs made out of the same stuff that allow us to move around. A digestive system that allows us to eat many types of food, so we have the energy to walk around on our legs, reach things with our arms, interact with the world and use our brains to think.

As we all know, that thinking part can be a problem at some point. Like when we are lifting things with our arms, instead our legs. Perhaps we are even bent or twisted at an odd angle during the lift, who knows? Anything is possible, especially if we are not really thinking about how we are moving.

But we humans often run on 'automatic pilot', doing things the way we have always done them. It's not so much that we aren't thinking, we are just letting our subconscious do the job for us. After all, we only have so much tolerance for thinking about mundane things like how we are moving, when we have important things to think about, like where we are going.

So, we go merrily along, doing what we always do, thinking about important things, and one day what we have always done fails us. We might get that sudden back pain that we have had before, but since it went away to the point that we stopped having back pain, why should we do anything different now?

Until one day we can't do what we've always done. Like move around on the planet walking on our own two legs. The legs that attach to our pelvis. The pelvis at the base of the spine. Remember, that's the spine that supports the weight of our entire upper body. And it rests on the pelvis (well, sacrum, if you want to be technical). In fact, that's where many people get back pain, and sometimes, if they let the pain go for long enough, they learn how to avoid the pain while resisting gravity. You know, doing important things like standing up or walking around?

The truth is that if we get a twist in our pelvis, the sacrum twists and tilts. The weight of the upper body rests UNEVENLY on the disc that is between the back and the sacrum. Eventually the disc begins to get squeezed and twisted and generally beat up until it gives up, and the center bulges out like a jelly center of a doughnut presses on the bread.

So, who gets a Disc Bulge? I would say anyone, but typically it's a person between the ages of 20 and 50 years old. See, before we're 20, we're just too darn new to break. After 20, we're someone old enough to lift heavy things, to sit funny for long periods of time, to work through pain, and to gut it out. Someone too busy to think about what they are doing. And, after about age 50, our discs begin to dry up a bit (along with the rest of our parts), so we are less likely to 'get a disc bulge. So, in answer to the question: who gets a disc bulge? Anyone between the ages of 20 and 50 who forgets that we can wear out faster than we think we will, and thinks that ignoring pain is a good idea might be the one who gets a disc bulge.