A new lower back pain study by the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reveals fewer episodes of disabling lower back pain for patients under chiropractic care, suggesting chiropractic is superior to physical therapy care.
I found this new study very interesting. For one, this is a study done by a medical journal, not a Chiropractic journal so any agenda or swaying of the results is not likely. Plus, this is a large sample size, almost a thousand people contributed. What the study says in a nutshell is that when patients with low back pain were tracked for a YEAR, patients that utilized physical therapy and/or medical interventions were associated with a higher recurrence of disability as opposed to patients that underwent Chiropractic care. In fact, the patients were TWICE as likely to end up disabled with a physical therapist (PT) and almost 2/3rds more likely to be disabled when partaking in traditional medical interventions.
This study is unique in that it was conducted by the Center for Disability Research at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Hopkinton, Mass; and the Center for Health Economics & Science Policy at United BioSource Corporation, London, United Kingdom.
Their objective was to compare the occurrences of repeated disability episodes between types of health care providers, who treat claimants with new episodes of work-related low back pain (LBP). They followed 894 patients over 1-year, using workers’ compensation claims data.
By controlling for demographics and severity, they determined the hazard ratio (HR) for disability recurrence between 3 types of providers:
Physical Therapists (PT), Physicians (MD), and Chiropractors (DC).
The results are quite interesting:
For PTs: HR = 2.0
For MDs: HR = 1.6
For DCs: HR = 1.0
Statistically, this means you are twice as likely to end up disabled if you got your care from a PT, rather than from a DC.
You’re also 60% more likely to be disabled if you choose an MD to manage your care, rather than a DC.
The authors concluded: “In work-related nonspecific LBP, the use of health maintenance care provided by physical therapist or physician services was associated with a higher disability recurrence than with chiropractic services or no treatment.”
Health Maintenance Care in Work-Related Low Back Pain and Its Association With Disability Recurrence. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2011 (Mar 14)