Although physical therapy may ease lower back pain at the early onset, research suggests that therapy has not been found to provide any long-term change to patterns of recurrence to this esperience.
Julie Fritz, the study's lead author and associate dean for reasearch in the College of Health at the University of Utah explains that back pain treatment cannot be a quick fix. She says that, more than anything, what physical therapy does is to aid the individual toward a more rapid return to normal function following an experience of back pain.
According to Reuters, the study, which is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, notes that 2 to 5 percent of visits to the doctor in the US and healthcare costs amounting to $86 billion may be ascribed to back pain complaints.
In such cases, the common and current guidelines practiced by physicians is to delay physical therapy or any other specialist treatments to allow for an observation period of a few weeks to see if back pain will subside without medical interference.
At the start of the study, the more than 200 patients who participated were randomly assigned to either receive physical therapy or receive no therapy for four weeks. These patients have had recent onset of lower back pain. No significant difference between the two groups were observed after one year of tracking apart from the improvement observed after the first three months of care.
To compare the benefits of an earlier start of physical therapy against current physician practices recommendation, the study assigned 108 individuals to receive early therapy and 112 individuals to receive therapy after the standard wait-and-see period.
Although early therapy showed statistical significance on disability improvement in relation to standard care, the amount of difference on the individual patient level is modest.
Sports medicine researcher Dr. Ryan Petering of Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland says, "For many patients, dealing with chronic back pain (the category you'd be in if still experiencing it at one year) requires maintenance therapy - not exclusively with a therapist but doing a home exercise program, possibly one given to you by a therapist."
External opinion from physical therapy researcher Steve George of the University of Florida maintains that providing physical therapy for a longer period of time may produce bigger benefits and that even if benefit is limited to the initial three months after the onset of back pain, patients may still see that this is worth the effort.
