Non specific lower back pain used to be treated with bed rest and firmer mattresses.
Now we know those are both bad things. When you lie on your bed you want to be able to slide your hand, with a little bit of effort, under your spine at your lower back.
We also know that carefully taking pain relief and keeping the back moving helps, as does specific exercise to strengthen the muscles.
Plenty of white collar workers have non specific lower back pain and spending hundreds of dollars on chairs may help, but exercise will help more.
Yeah, because we hadn't discovered H Pylori as a causative agent and developed treatments.
> "Then, it was back problems"
Because manual labor in blue collar work was a lot more common back then.