Study shows: do not take back complaints lightly
“Back complaints are not to be trifled with!” An advice that probably many Germans have already received once. And yet it does not wear off, simply because it is true. Back pain should not be ignored under any circumstances, lying idly in bed rarely helps. It is a proven fact that movement usually helps the back – even if painkillers are needed in the beginning to be able to make any movements at all.
This is also confirmed by a recently published study by the US Army, which also provides interesting findings for the rest of the population. The focus here is on the subject of back problems and their physiotherapeutic treatment. The study shows: patients with initial back problems should start physiotherapy as soon as possible and by no means delay it.
Physical therapy worthwhile for patients and insurance
Back pain should not be ignored under any circumstances; lying idly in bed rarely helps.
The study draws on a dataset of more than ten million people who have health insurance through the military and therefore allows for quite general conclusions. For example, in the years 2007 to 2009 alone, 750,000 of those insured visited a doctor for the first time because of lower back complaints. On average, these people were 37 years old.
Only 123,000 of them subsequently started physiotherapy, and only one in four of them did so in the first two weeks after diagnosis.
Within the study it was analyzed how the patients felt in the following years after the first visit to the doctor. For example, insured patients who started physiotherapy after 14 days at the latest were “significantly less likely” to need surgery, injections for their pain, painkillers or a computer tomograph. What’s more, their continued treatment cost the insurer an average of 60 percent less than that of insureds who didn’t start treatment or exercises until well after diagnosis.
Benefits of physical therapy not well known?
Patients who received early physiotherapy treatment required significantly less pain medication overall than those who were not prescribed physiotherapy at all.
Physiotherapists, who are trained in Germany at vocational schools such as the WBS schools within three years, therefore play a very central role in the treatment of back pain, the study clearly shows. It is not without reason that politicians are now thinking about upgrading the position of physiotherapists by granting them the right to judge which treatments their patients need without having to follow a doctor’s instructions.
But by no means everyone seems to have recognized how important and purposeful the work of physical therapists is. The study by the U.S. Army also shows that only about half of the 750,000 insured patients who were prescribed physical therapy for back problems actually used it. Forty-two percent of patients with a back condition simply let their referral lapse.
