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Have Low Back Pain? Research says: Don’t Wait Around!

We have all been there. You’ve thrown your back out and you wave it off thinking it will go away. A few days pass, and it’s still there so you decide to self-treat - heat packs, ice packs, rest, etc. A week or two passes and the pain has not only remained, but it has gotten worse! Nothing you do seems to work, so you decide it’s time to go see a doctor. For those with acute lower back pain (ALBP), it’s often serious enough to be sent to see a specialist - and the wait times can be months! What if we told you that for most back pain issues, waiting to see a doctor or specialist is actually causing you unnecessary prolonged pain?

A recent study that won a Best Paper Award at the North American Spine Society Annual Meeting (2019), showed that select community chiropractors from British Columbia Provincial Health Regions that saw referrals from a hospital-supervised primary care spine program to treat ALBP patients using a standardized protocol comprising of a four-week course of chiropractic lumbar spinal manipulative therapy (CSMT) only and a tailored exercise program resulted in improved outcome measures overall.

Over the five years of this study, patient pain scores significantly improved for 87% of patients. The average wait times for access to treatment also decreased to only 7.4 days. In addition, at the end of this five year study, 86% of the participating patients were discharged from the hospital spine program with no requested follow-up after six months, and 82% of patients reported high satisfaction scores!

So don’t wait to go see your chiropractor the next time you have back pain!

Bishop, P. B., Quon, J.A., Yee, B. W., Arthur, B. E., Fedder, P. G., Forbes, J. C., Lee, E., Lopes, A. A., Maylin-Lee, A. M., Morton, E. P., Vipond, M. J., McDonnell, C. (2019). Chiropractors treating patients with acute lower back pain in a spine treatment pathway model: a five-year prospective cohort study. The Spine Journal, 19(11), S69. https://www.thespinejournalonline.com/article/S1529-9430(19)30343-2/fulltext