Chiropractic News - August 2008
Do you suffer from chronic low-back pain?
A new study shows that chiropractic care is more effective than medical care for chronic low-back pain, and patients who were treated by a chiropractor showed significant improvements over those treated medically.
At Better Health Center, Dr. Wolff focuses on correcting a spinal condition called Vertebral Subluxation - a disorder characterized by restricted spinal movement or the misalignment of spinal bones or vertebrae. Through gentle and effective maneuvers called chiropractic adjustments, Dr. Wolff corrects vertebral subluxations. These types of adjustments have been shown to be more effective than other methods for alleviating chronic low-back pain.
What is Chronic Low-Back Pain?
Chronic low-back pain, or CLBP, is a condition of persistent, long-term low-back pain that lasts for over 12 weeks. Symptoms of CLBP may come and go, but they don't just go away, even with medical treatment.
The CLBP Study and Its Findings
The study was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (Chiropractic Management of Chronic Low-Back Pain: Commentary on Wilkey et al, by Daniel Redwood, D.C., June 2008). The study was conducted by Adam Wilkey, D.C., a chiropractor in private practice in Oldham, United Kingdom, and Michael Gregory, M.B., Ch.B., FRCA, a researcher at the Royal Oldham Hospital.
The study's authors conducted this analysis because there is a need for additional studies that compare chiropractic care to medical care in patients with CLBP.
Most research on CLBP focuses on patients with injury-related low-back pain; however, Dr. Redwood points out that a "strong majority of these studies found that manual manipulation outperformed competing options, and in no study did a comparison treatment or placebo outperform manipulation."
He also found that none of the participants in the trials experienced a major negative reaction to chiropractic care, and that leading government consensus panels in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand are recommending spinal manipulation in their low-back pain guidelines.
The study took place at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital outpatient clinic in the United Kingdom, and included 30 patients who suffered from low-back pain for more than 12 weeks. All of the patients were between the ages of 18 and 65. Researchers randomly assigned study participants to either medical treatment or chiropractic care. Both groups began the study with the same levels of pain; however, the chiropractic group was, on average, a decade older and had suffered from CLBP for an average of 3 years longer.
The patients received their randomly assigned type of care, only, for 8 weeks. The medical care group underwent standard standard treatment protocols established within the pain clinic, including oral and injected medicines and trascutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). The chiropractic care group received standard chiropractic adjustments performed to alleviate vertebral subluxations.
Results were determined by patients completing questionnaires accepted by the medical and chiropractic professions for evaluation of back pain, called the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire, and the Numerical Rating Scale, before, during and after the study.
The study findings demonstrated that the chiropractic patients had a significant improvement over the medical patients, in both the reduction in disability, as well as the reduction in pain intensity. Considering that the chiropractic patients were older and had suffered their conditions longer, these findings become even more momentous.
We have provided a copy of the study, Chiropractic Management of Chronic Low-Back Pain: Commentary on Wilkey et al, by Daniel Redwood, D.C., June 2008, if you would like to read about these amazing results for yourself.
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