Most non-interventional back pain treatments are useless: systematic review
Poor study design and lack of placebo or sham controls hamper assessment of the evidence, researchers say.
Only 10% of non-interventional treatments for lower back pain are likely to provide any relief, and those effects are small, a systematic review has found.
The international review and meta-analysis, led by UNSW Sydney, analysed 301 randomised placebo-controlled trials covering 56 different treatments for non-specific lower back pain in adults.
They excluded surgical and interventional treatments, such as injections or ablations.
The review found that only one treatment — NSAIDs — had moderate-certainty evidence of efficacy for acute low back pain.
