Why Practitioners Fail To Fix Chronic Low Back Pain?

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What are the major reasons practitioners fail to fix chronic low back pain?

A major reason practitioners fail to resolve chronic low back pain is because they fail to nail down an accurate diagnosis. No specific medical diagnosis is made in approximately 90 per cent of low back pain patients.

Often this is because most causes of low back pain lack objective clinical signs and overt pathological changes. Over 70 per cent of all chronic low back pain comes from either a facet joint, sacroiliac joint or disc.

So why are practitioners still not coming up with a diagnosis for patients with chronic low back pain?

The purpose of a diagnosis is to identify a condition and its specific location. If a diagnosis fails to do so, it is worthless. If you are given a specific diagnosis, you have a much better chance of seeing results from a tailored treatment.
When practitioners are unsuccessful in improving low back pain it usually means one of two things. Either their diagnosis is wrong and, therefore, their treatment is inappropriate, or the diagnosis is correct but the practitioner is not skilled enough to fix the problem. With an experienced practitioner, the likelihood of their skill being inadequate decreases dramatically. Therefore, the most common cause of treatment failure is an incorrect diagnosis.

Don’t be afraid to ask your practitioner to tell you what your diagnosis is. Even better, ask them to write it down for you.
Pain is a confusing concept, and one that we still don’t fully understand. Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain is how your body lets you know something is not right. Issues often arise when we choose to ignore pain or take drugs to numb the effects of pain.

Medicine, allied health care and complementary medicine

Luckily, you have a wide choice in the type of health practitioner you can consult for your health needs. It’s been reported that 42 per cent of the population in the United States now use non-medical approaches such as complementary or alternative medicine, especially for back problems.

Chiropractic treatment was reported to be the most popular of the 16 alter-native therapies examined. Another study reported that 54 per cent of the population in the United States use complementary or alternative medicine, of which chiropractic treatment accounted for 20 per cent, massage for 14 per cent and relaxation techniques accounted for 12 per cent of treatments.

Standard medical treatment providers were rated ‘very helpful’ for back and neck pain by 27 per cent of patients. In comparison, up to 65 per cent of complementary and alternative treatment seekers rated those therapies as ‘very helpful’.