“For example, individuals at a low risk of persistent disabled problems can be reassured and discouraged from receiving unnecessary treatments and investigations, while those at high risk can matched to treatment which combines physical and psychological approaches”
For those of you that haven’t read my previous posts on the Start Back Screening Tool, then this first post may not make sense. It is recommended to read those posts before reading this post.
In short, some patients improve without treatment, with simple advice to stay active.
“In addition, an implementation study testing risk stratification for patients with low back pain in routine general practice demonstrated significant improvements in physical function and time off work, sickness certification rates and reductions in healthcare costs compared to usual non-stratified care.”
Who knew? 🤷♂️
If we start classifying patients, we tend to get better results.
This should be a no-brained. Two different patients with similar pains may respond completely different to treatments. We need to be able to determine which type of intervention/or lack of intervention is best paired with each type of patient.
Until we get better at understanding the patient and both the patient’s response to movement and belief systems, we will continue to fail a percentage of these patients when they come into the clinic. Some patients will improve regardless of the intervention/treatment.
“GPs are not alone in wanting information about patients’ likely prognosis over time, as >80% of musculoskeletal patients also want prognostic information from their GO, although less than a third actually receive this information”
The fact that almost 1/3 of patients receive information from their physician is surprising to me. With shortened face time with physicians and the incentive to refer within the system in which the GPs operate, I’m surprised that there is enough time to spend educating even 1/3 of patients.
We know that patients want information. What is bothersome to me is that some practitioners, throughout healthcare as a whole, give patients flippant answers without substance. These patients then hang on to that information and allow it to dictate how they live or avoid living life.
To tell a patient with osteoporosis that they will fracture their spine when flexing can produce fear of a movement and greatly impact the patients quality of life. Giving the patient statistics about fracturing, not just with bending but also with staying neutral, allows the patient to have a more active role in decision-making.
The last thing we want to do is to label a patient, or cause a patient to label themself, as having “big bones”, slipped discs, degenerative spines, or as many of my patients say “Uncle Arthur”.
“The distribution of primary pain regions was reported by clinicians as: lower limb 31.1%, Back 28.7%, upper limb 23.5%, neck 11.8%, and multisite pain 4.8%”
The modified STarT Back tool is a version explores more options than back pain only.
“…a modified STarT Back Tool is similarly predictive of 6-month physical health across different musculoskeletal pain regions.”
This type of prognostic data is important for healthcare providers to obtain in order to build a long-term plan for patients beyond simply 3 times per week for 6 weeks of therapy.
What happens to patients after this six weeks?
If we have not educated and empowered the patient, they will become a patient again.
“This implies that the existing STarT Back Tool score cut-point (4 or more out of 9) used to allocate patients with low back pain to the medium-risk/high-risk subgroups cannot simply became applied to patients with other musculoskeletal pain presentations or in different clinical services”
This is pretty self-explanatory. We can’t use a back tool to help us make decisions about a knee pain, neck pain, headache, etc.
“It is found that regardless of body region of pain, higher modified STarT Back Tool scores were associated with higher levels of kinesiophobia, catastrophising, fear avoidance, anxiety and depressive symptoms.”
Kinesiophobia is fear of movement. Catastrophising is making a bigger deal out of a situation than it actually is. Fear avoidance is actively avoiding an activity for fear of making oneself worse.
None of these descriptors are good, but you know what…we work with them in physical therapy.
Let me say this differently…a good physical therapist will work on these issues, but not all address these issues.
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