Non Surgical Back Pain Relief Treatment Should Be Fully Explored Before Going Under The Knife

There are a lot of non-surgical options available for treating back pain. Patients are often confused about choosing one of these non-surgical options for their treatment. That is why proper education about the treatment available is important. You need to know the pros and cons of the treatment for patients who are suffering from back pain. To get the optimum value of the treatment expenditure, a patient needs to be educated about the treatment options available.

The chosen option should be used after considering a number of factors such as weight, age, physical well being, medical history, and so on. Not all non surgical treatments may be suitable for everybody. Before actually considering surgery, all the available options should be explored by both the patient and the doctor. Other health professionals may also be consulted before taking actual decision is made as their input often proves a vital part in the decision.

A multi disciplinary non-surgical treatment is used as part of an integrated care program, which has been proven to be beneficial to patients. They have become successful in treating back pain without any surgery. Spine surgery has risk of complications and it is not always successful. Also, the expense of surgery is much higher than non-surgical treatments.

Therefore, it is a good idea to get educated about all the non surgical back pain relief treatment available – so get some great information below:

 Non Surgical Back Pain Relief Treatment

1. Gather additional information from patients. Physicians may need to spend additional time gathering information from patients to improve differential diagnostic accuracy so they can more effectively identify patients likely to respond to specific surgical treatments. Physicians may also need to further educate patients and offer assistance in determining the best approach,rather than providing a pro form a six weeks of physical therapy before recommending surgery.

 

Value-based guidelines may call for consideration of the impact of such factors as the patient’s weight, exercise routine, ergonomics in the workplace, use of pain management techniques or an assessment by a physiatrist – all of which may help demonstrate reliable value.

 

2. Explore relationships with allied health professionals. To better understand the value of nonsurgical treatment – or perhaps even to leverage it to their advantage – physicians can explore relationships with allied health professionals. For example, some studies have found that lumbar fusion surgery for discogenic axial low back pain appears to offer only limited relative benefits over cognitive behavioral therapy and intensive rehabilitation, and that as few as 50 percent of fusion patients are likely to have high-quality outcomes.

 

While additional studies in this area will be beneficial, there is evidence that use of non-surgical treatments, such as through an integrated care program, substantially reduced disability resulting from chronic low back pain in the patient’s private and working life. There is also evidence that intensive multidisciplinary biopsychosocial rehabilitation with functional restoration reduces pain and improves function in patients with chronic low back pain, while less intensive interventions did not show improvements in clinically relevant outcomes.

 

Physicians could potentially better utilize these, or similar procedures in the overall treatment of their patients, rather than immediately seeking surgical options.

 

3. Make the choice between nonsurgical options easier. Presently, nonsurgical treatment is underutilized,in part because both doctors and patients find it difficult to choose among the variety of nonsurgical options. While current guidelines acknowledge that patients can benefit from a nonsurgical approach, nonsurgical options may not be adequately explored and are more often treated as a prelude to surgery.It’s clear that current guidelines must develop a care path to help choose from available treatments prior to considering surgery.

 

It is important to note that no clear line identifies spinal surgery as offering greater relief than nonsurgical treatment for patients with degenerative disc disease, disc herniation, or low back pain. Compounding the problem, the increase in spinal fusion surgery has resulted in greater complications, longer hospital stays, and increased readmissions. This means greater costs without improved outcomes. Overall, costs for spine care have increased substantially, with national expenditures associated with spine problems totaling $86 billion in 2005, an increase of 65 percent since 1997.

 

4. Don’t treat nonsurgical care as the step before surgery. In today’s transitional healthcare environment, physicians can’t simply view nonsurgical treatment as an obligation before ultimately getting a patient into the operating room. Nonsurgical treatment must become a strategic option in deciding a patient’s care path in light of questions about the effectiveness of surgery and pushback from payors. The trend toward more restrictive use of surgical intervention, and reduced reimbursement for it, will continue and accelerate in the absence of hard data and advances in differential diagnosis. Spine surgeons need to take on this challenge themselves in order to have any counter-argument to payer cost-reduction policy actions.

 

Further evidence of this trend can be seen in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report identifying spine care as one of its priority areas for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). The goal of CER will be to develop predictive care paths and change quality metrics, ultimately leading to lower costs and improved outcomes. According to the IOM, “there frequently are no studies that directly compare the different available alternatives or that have examined their impacts in populations of the same age, sex, and ethnicity or with the same comorbidities as the patient. [CER] is designed to fill this knowledge gap.”

 

CER will compare the effectiveness of surgical vs. nonsurgical treatment strategies for different types of spinal disorders and pain broadly, and also within more specific demographics. This will include comparing spinal fusion to pharmacologic treatment with physical therapy, and establishing prospective registries to understand outcomes of different surgeries compared to nonsurgical treatment, to name a few. Whatever the outcome of CER, physicians should expect payors to adopt the results in making payment determinations. And as described above, recent research has indicated that nonsurgical treatments will need to be taken seriously as payors restrict access to surgical options.

 

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It is a common belief that spine surgery is a complicated and expensive option. Many people actually want to opt out, especially if other non-surgical treatments are available because of the costs involved. There are also concerns about complications that may arrive post surgery. As there are numerous non-surgical treatments available, patients and doctors need to choose the treatment that will be of optimal assistance to the patient, yielding results that are affordable. These non-surgical treatments are free of tensions related to surgery and after effects of drugs. A patient suffering from back pain should consider and explore all the options of non surgical back pain relief treatment before just accepting surgery immediately as the only option.

For a heap of  non surgical back pain relief options be sure to grab yourself a copy of the 7 day back pain cure, the free hardcover book available from our website. You can get it in a few minutes by signing up on the offer box on the top right hand side of this page.