Barriers to good pain rehabilitation

This is a long…… readooops, sorry, not. Low back pain is, we know, the greatest contributor to days lived with disability (Rice, Smith & Blyth, 2016). And no-one anywhere in the world has found a good mix of services to reduce the number of days lived with disability as a result of this problem. And yet billions of dollars are used to fund research into the many contributors to a shift from acute low back pain to ongoing disability associated with low back pain. At the same time, treatments that directly target disability, rather than pain (a target considered the most important outcome by Sullivan and Ballantyne, 2016) are difficult to access, by comparison with surgical solutions (or pharmaceutical or procedural). Overuse of unhelpful treatments is thought to occur when treatments are offered that are ineffective, pose high risks of harm, or where the balance between harms and benefits varies considerably (Brownlee, Chalkidou, Doust, Elshaug, Glasziou, Heath et al, 2017). Non-pharmcological, non-surgical, and non-procedural treatments fall into the large amorphous group of treatments often delivered by allied health clinicians. When asked, clinicians (aka doctors, in this instance) were found in one study, to fall into three groups: Multimodel/Aggressive = 14%; Psychosocial/Nonopioid = 48%; and Low action = 38% (Phelan, van Ryn, Wall & Burgess, 2009). On the face of it, this looks reasonably good except when we have a look at what the numbers me...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Low back pain Pain conditions Research Science in practice health funding health systems models of care Source Type: blogs