When back pain needs someone else
Before anything else. Back pain with numbness or weakness in a leg, loss of bladder or bowel control, pain following a fall or injury, unexplained weight loss, or pain that wakes you at night needs medical assessment, not reflexology. Some of that list is urgent.
Reflexology is for the ordinary, grumbling, mechanical back tension that most people accumulate — not for working out why your back hurts.
The spinal reflex
It is the longest single zone on the map. The spine reflex runs the entire medial edge of the foot: cervical vertebrae nearest the big toe, thoracic through the arch, lumbar toward the heel, sacrum and coccyx at the heel itself.
That correspondence makes it one of the more intuitive zones to explain. Where in your back it hurts changes where along that edge the time goes, which is why the consultation asks.
The pelvis and heel
The pelvis reflex covers the heel pad, and clients with lower back tension frequently find it the most eventful part of the session. The area is worked slowly rather than briskly.
Where tension sits lower and to one side, the outer heel gets more attention. None of this is a diagnosis of what is happening in your back — it is a response to where you say you feel it.
What clients notice
Most commonly a sense of the whole area settling rather than a specific spot changing, and often a session that feels longer than it was. Clients frequently say the heel work is where they notice the most.
I would not tell you reflexology will resolve back pain, because it will not and that is not what it does. What it offers is an hour of stillness for a body that has been braced.
Alongside other care
Reflexology is a complementary therapy and does not diagnose, treat or cure back problems. If you are seeing a physiotherapist, osteopath or GP, keep doing that. Plenty of my clients do both and find they serve different purposes.