Can a psychologist help your Back pain?
Hello!
We have been helping people cure their back pain for years. With that long time of working with people with severe back pain and doing more research on how to do it better, we come across all kinds of techniques.
The one I am going to tell you about today ispsychotherapy as a treatment for back pain.
What do you think? Will going to see a psychologist help you with your pain?
Let us look at the evidence.
I found this scientific research article did a systematic review on many studies that tried to see if Pain neurophysiology education (PNE), a psychological approach to educating people about their pain and doing so will reduce it, works.
This is what they found,” According to the CBRG (Cochrane Back Review Group) criteria there was very low quality evidence that PNE is beneficial for pain, physical-function, psychological-function, and social-function.”
In short it means it doesn’t work to help with reducing the intensity of the pain, people’s ability to do things with their pain, how well they are coping psychologically and how involved or well they are doing with their friends and family.
They also found that “Meta-analysis found PNE produced statistically significant but clinicallysmall improvements in short-term pain of 5 mm(0, 10.0 mm) [mean difference (95%CI)] on the 100 mm VAS.”
VAS is the pain scale that you get asked “What is your pain on a scale from 1 to 10?” but instead of out of 10 it’s out of 100.
This finding tells us that the technique is only able toreduce these peoples pain by 5 points out of the 100 for a short while.
Does that sound like an effective solution?
Do you want to try another solution that has a long track record of success?
Jason
