Your article makes two basic claims: 1) That we don't know enough about back pain to say were the pain came from, and shouldn't speculate. 2) We know enough about back pain to say that your rehab protocol worked.
We'll come back to the basic contradiction here, but let's first look at the claims in detail.
First, what do we know about back pain?
This seems to stick closely to your referenced studies. For example, see especially the conclusion to Jensen et al.:
And the other two cited studies seem to back this up, especially Savage et al., who is appropriately savage on MRI diagnoses. I don't know if MRI has become a better diagnostic in the last two decades since these articles appeared, but I'm willing to bet not. Let's go on:
Wait just a moment. This does not follow. I feel that you have misunderstood something. What your cited studies say is that the herniation may be unrelated to current pain (or it may not). The studies suggest that there is no way to tell. Your speculation on where the herniation came from is unwarranted. A correct statement, following your studies and not derailing the thrust of your article, would be to replace this with something like the following: "the herniation may or may not have had anything to do with the pain, and it is impossible to tell whether it is new or old without a previous MRI." (Also, this is only a nitpick, but you have slightly misunderstood the meaning of "degeneration" in this context. It's state descriptive, and not meant by the authors to describe a cause or to preclude trauma or injury.)