Disability due to back pain worldwide has gone up by 50 per cent since 1990. And most treatments don’t help, according to a series of papers on Back Pain published in The Lancet.
Low back pain, once a first world problem, is now increasingly prevalent in low income and middle income countries like India. The papers say the treatment varies dramatically from bed rest to injections to surgeries and even addictive drugs.
What’s worse, doctors and physiotherapists offer harmful treatments to patients instead of being real and telling them nothing can be done but to stay active.
The Lancet published three papers on low back pain, by an international group of authors led by Prof Rachelle Buchbinder of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
The papers call for recognition of low back pain as a disability and focus on psychological and social contributors to the condition instead of suggesting useless scans and treatments.
The Lancet papers found that globally, years lived with disability caused by low back pain increased by 54 per cent between 1990 and 2015. They attributed this to increasing and ageing population and sedentary lifestyle.
It is estimated 540 million people worldwide are now affected by back pain at any one time.
According to one study, in India, 20 per cent of cases of low back pain are in the age group of 16 to 34.
According to one of the papers, people with physically demanding jobs, physical and mental comorbidities, smokers, and obese individuals are at greatest risk of reporting low back pain.
For most people with new episodes of low back pain, recovery is quick. Only in a small number of people it becomes disabling.
The lead author calls on the World Health Organisation to put disabling low back pain on the target list for all nations and to actively increase awareness.
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