According to an article published in The Gateway, results from a study by University of Alberta researchers have shown that people who believe they have chronic back pain are more likely to have a longer recovery time. Two researchers from the Faculty of Rehabilitation, Doug Gross and Michele Crites-Battie, looked at injured employees going into a rehabilitation centre run by the Workers Compensation Board. They found that those who suffered from back pain were most likely to have negative expectations on their rate of recovery, in part because they believed that the back pain was chronic.
The injury groups they studied were back pain, strains and sprains, fractures, dislocations, amputations, and repetitive strain. “Back pain makes up the biggest category of injured workers, making it the most problematic and expensive group,” Gross said. “Expectations were worse for people with back pain than any of the other groups. People were less positive about back pain then they were about amputations. That tells us something.”
Gross explained that back pain is something many people don’t ever think will get better because they don’t understand what causes it or how they can get rid of it. “People go to a doctor thinking they will get a pill that will take their pain away and that they will be cured,” Gross said. “They view chronic back pain as a really nasty condition that you don’t want to get and should be afraid of.”
“What needs to change is people thinking of back pain as a disabling condition that’s going to last for the rest of their life. They think something inside of them is broken, or degenerating, when really that’s not it.”
He said that if people think they are never going to get better, that is going to affect their expectations of recovery. “That’s where people’s expectations and what they believe about their back pain comes into play. If they think their spine is degrading and they’re never going to get better, they’re going to be less likely to do the things that will help them get better,” he said. Gross said that the old cure for back pain — bed rest — is actually the worst thing to do. The best way to improve is to stay as active as possible and keep up normal activities.
Most causes of back pain are non-specific, with only 10 to 15 per cent of cases having an identifiable cause. “Compression fracture, a bulging disk pinching a nerve — those we can diagnose. Most of the time we can’t narrow it down to a specific tissue, but we do know it will go away,” Gross said. “Just about everyone gets back pain and most of the time it goes away within a couple weeks.” “We can’t cure back pain, but we can change what people think about it.”