Deyo and Weinstein’s 2001 low back pain tutorial
Nine pages on PainSci cite Deyo 2001: 1. Reviews of Pain Professions 2. The Complete Guide to Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain 3. (Almost) Never Use Ice on Low Back Pain! 4. The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain 5. The Complete Guide to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome 6. A Historical Perspective On Aches ‘n’ Pains 7. Your Back Is Not Out of Alignment 8. MRI and X-Ray Often Worse than Useless for Back Pain 9. Massage Therapy Kinda, Sorta Works for Back Pain
PainSci commentary on Deyo 2001: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
Although it’s getting old, this remains an excellent tutorial for health professionals, offering a thorough and sensible survey of current medical knowledge about low back pain. Deyo and Weinstein are strongly critical of overmedicalization and excessive imaging and surgery for low back pain, and emphasize the favourable prognosis for most back pain, the poor correlation between imaging results and symptoms, and the absence of any clear pathophysiological mechanism to explain most low back pain. All of their key points have been reinforced by scientific evidence ever since.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Gabapentinoids and Risk of Hip Fracture. Leung 2024 JAMA Netw Open.
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.