Do back pain sufferers get better regardless of how they are treated? asks Stoke medic
A family doctor in Stoke has been awarded major charity funding to answer the question: do people with back pain get better no matter what treatment they use? and if so, why?
Dr Majid Artus, a part-time GP Principal at the Orchard Surgery in Norton, Stoke-on-Trent, has been awarded a Primary Care Fellowship of £266,335 over four years by the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc).
He will carry out the work at the University of Keele’s Primary Care Musculoskeletal Research Centre, the leading centre in the UK dedicated to improving the treatment of arthritis patients in GP surgeries.
Recent studies on treatment for back pain have consistently shown no or only small differences between treatments, and patients seem to improve or respond in a similar way regardless of the treatment used. Dr Artus will carry out a thorough academic analysis of more than 600 back pain trials around the world to prove if this important observation is indeed, the case.
Dr Artus said that if he found that back pain patients improved regardless of treatment, factors other than the treatment itself may explain this. “For example, high expectations when participating in research may influence symptoms more strongly than the treatment itself,” he explained. For this reason, one aspect of Dr Artus’s work will be to compare improvement in symptoms among patients on trials with that of patients not taking part in such studies
The placebo effect – the power of the mind to suggest that a treatment is working even when the treatment is actually fake because of the beliefs and expectations of the patient – can also influence symptom improvement, as well as patients’ beliefs or previous experiences of preferences. However, researchers have always tried hard in their studies to remove and eliminate these issues from their work, and focus on studying the actual treatment effect only.
