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:
- Long-Term Effects of Repeated Injections of Local Anesthetic With or Without Corticosteroid for Lumbar Spinal Stenosis: A Randomized Trial. Friedly 2017 Arch Phys Med Rehabil.
- Cannabis-based medicines for chronic neuropathic pain in adults. Ateş 2026 Cochrane Database Syst Rev.
- Effect of exercise on depression and anxiety symptoms: systematic umbrella review with meta-meta-analysis. Munro 2026 Br J Sports Med.
- Optimizing elastic band resistance training for Metabolic Syndrome components in older adults: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression of randomized controlled trials. Saez-Berlanga 2026 Arch Phys Med Rehabil.
- Biomechanical insights into Achilles tendinopathy risk and protection in runners: a large prospective study 4HAIE. Jandacka 2026 Br J Sports Med.