Articles: low-back-pain.
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This study is an analysis of national survey data from 5 sample years. ⋯ Back pain remains a major reason for all physician office visits. This study describes visit, referral, and management patterns among specialties providing the most care.
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Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care · Jan 1995
Comparative StudyThe impact of a guideline-driven computer charting system on the emergency care of patients with acute low back pain.
Federal guidelines for the treatment of acute low back pain were locally modified and made more specific. These guidelines were then programmed into a rule-based computer charting system which provides real-time advice regarding documentation, testing, treatment, and disposition of emergency department patients with this condition. ⋯ These findings contrast with our previous experiment using a similar program for the care of health care workers exposed to body fluids. In that study both the appropriateness of care and the cost-effectiveness of care were substantially improved.
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Physicians were surveyed regarding their beliefs about treatment efficacy for patients with low back pain. ⋯ The lack of consensus among physicians could be attributable to the absence of clear evidence-based clinical guidelines, ignorance or rejection of existing scientific evidence, excessive commitment to a particular mode of therapy, or a tendency to discount the efficacy of competing treatments.
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Disability accompanying occupational low back pain (LBP) can include a wide range of incapacitating symptoms which, for the practitioner, can be time-consuming and difficult to identify systematically. A questionnaire designed for case-finding and assessment could assist in both the early recognition of disability and in planning management. A suitable questionnaire for clinical use could not be found in the literature. ⋯ The questionnaire includes 79 items based on the subjects' perceived health status. The response structure of the CBSQ has been adapted from that of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and some items in the CBSQ have been developed from items in the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP) and GHQ. The questionnaire discriminates effectively between subjects with different degrees of disability, it correlates quite well with the SIP, test-retest reliability for the whole questionnaire is 0.98, the receiver-operating characteristics are more favourable than those for the SIP, and the CBSQ screening score provides an index of severity which correlates with work incapacity.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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The current prospective longitudinal study examined the predictive value of psychological, somatic and social variables for the prediction of the short- and long-term follow-up in 111 consecutively selected patients with acute radicular pain and a lumbar disc prolapse or protrusion. ⋯ The results lead to several hypotheses about biopsychosocial interrelations within the chronification of radicular pain and provide the clinician with a short screening instrument for early diagnosis of chronification.