Harrison Lister first went to the doctor after feeling a "niggle" in his lower back.
Three years later, he has been referred to multiple specialists, spent thousands on treatment and the pain has only gotten worse.
"My first problem was when nothing was showing up on the scans," he says.
"Nothing that was an obvious marker — there was no injury to chase and follow."
The 30-year-old does shiftwork on the ports and says the pain comes whenever his body isn't moving.
"My pain is at its worst when I'm trying to sleep, it wakes me up in the middle of the night and makes getting back to sleep a nightmare," he says.
"You feel like you've constantly got something digging at your back."
Mr Lister recently received a possible diagnosis for ankylosing spondylitis — an insidious form of arthritis that's development is poorly understood.
There is no clear treatment for the condition other than pain medication, an option limited for Mr Lister.
"I operate heavy machinery for work so I'm not able to take a bunch of [painkillers] and the ones I am allowed to [take] don't really help — I just have to deal with it," he says.
Mr Lister says despite healthcare professionals being eager to help, he feels no closer to relieving the pain.
"Everyone was interested in helping me, but the issue comes when they promise the world — everyone says that [they're] the one that can help you," he says.
"[They say] that other physios, they don't know what they're talking about.
"You spend how many pay cheques on that, and then you're still in the same spot again."
A back pain 'epidemic' and the power of the mind
Back pain affects one in six Australians, cost the nation's health system $3.4 billion in 2019–20 and is the country's third leading cause of disease burden.
Science journalist Liam Mannix has described the impact of back pain as "an epidemic of extraordinary scale".
Mannix was inspired by his and his father's experience with back pain to take a forensic look at the cause of the problem and why available treatments do not work for many sufferers in his new book Back Up.
"The thing with back pain is there are so, so many treatments and as experts said to me, that's often a really good indication that we don't have one that works very well," he says.
"If you look at an infectious disease, you have disease X, you have one treatment and you do it because it works.
"In back pain, we don't have, at this stage, a lot that can help people who have chronic back pain."
Mannix says that through his research, he found that focusing on managing pain through the mind rather than seeking immediate treatment, sufferers could potentially find more relief.
"Research, for a very long time, has focused on anatomical causes — particularly the discs in the back," he says
"We have this very mechanical view of the body — I think it comes from the high-technology society we live in.
"This idea that if a part of your car is broken, [you] pull out the part, put in a new part, and you'll be right as rain — but that approach often doesn't work so well with bodies, which are alive, which can heal, which have really, really complex pain systems."
Learning to live with it
Former president of Australian Medical Association Dr Mukesh Haikerwal says that people suffering with back pain need to be careful of "folklore".
"There are lots of old wives' tales that still come through, which you have to dispel myths to get people right," he says.
"There are good times and bad times [with back pain], you've got to live with it and you've got to know how to deal with it."
Dr Haikerwal says that finding the "right medications, manipulations" are key to finding relief.
Mr Lister says that he's still on "the lookout for answer to his pain" but he has "learned to live with it".
"There's certain activities I'll stay away from as I know they'll trigger another flare up, I make sure I organise my social events around things that are 'back friendly'."
Mannix says physiotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy are the most accessible approaches for many suffering with back pain.
He says that cognitive functioning training is a "really exciting" new approach that involves working with a physiotherapist to move through painful movements and change the way your mind processes pain.
"You might want to bend down and pick up a pen, but you're worried that your disc will slide out of alignment or you'll injure yourself — the physiotherapist will very gently go through it with you so that your body relaxes and so crucially that your brain learns that your back perhaps is not as damaged as it thought," he says.
"If we can rebuild that back and brain connection, conquer stress, push down fear, then the evidence suggests that these sort of new approaches might be very promising."