Why you shouldn’t just put up with lower back pain!

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You would think that if somebody was in pain that they would seek help to try to improve or get rid of it....



Amazingly though, people more often than not, just simply put up with it for long periods of time. This is very frustrating as a Physio and but more importantly, there is good reason why you should get it looked at sooner rather than later.

Don’t take my word for it! This is what the research says:

Wand et al (2004) found that early Physiotherapy is very important in acute lower back pain. They found that it was more effective than just getting advice to stay active. Early Physiotherapy lead to a more rapid improvement in function, mood, quality of life and general health. Even more importantly getting early Physiotherapy helps to prevent the development of psychosocial features, which a massive problems for developing long standing chronic lower back pain.

This was also supported by Mo-Yee Lau et al (2008) who found that early physiotherapy was effective in reducing pain and increasing satisfaction for patients with acute low back pain in an Accident and Emergency Department.



An Acute Musculoskeletal Pain Service in A&E was initiated with the primary objective of reducing acute and severe lower back pain admissions with early physiotherapy intervention. Before this service all of these referrals were cases that would have been admitted to inpatients. Overall it was found that the service was effective in reducing lower back pain admission rates by 89.5% over 6 month and the re-attendance rate was also relatively low also. The Physiotherapists were also accurate in recognising the need for a specialist Orthopaedic referral at the appropriate time (Leo et al 2015).

Early Physiotherapy for acute lower back pain displayed statistically significant fewer indices of chronic pain disability on a wide range of work, healthcare utilisation, medication use and self-reported pain. They also found that there were greater cost savings associated with the early intervention group versus the no early intervention group (Gatchel et al 2003).


So overall the evidence is pretty clear when it comes to acute lower back pain! Get it seen early to minimize the risk of long term back pain and it is more cost effective to sort it early than later!!

If you need more information on lower back pain or need to book an appointment then call me on 01782 771861 or 07866195914



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