Back Pain Spending Up, Relief Down - washingtonpost.com

Back Pain Spending Up, Relief Down - washingtonpost.com: "Americans are spending more money trying to ease back and neck pain, but new research suggests those extra dollars aren't buying more relief.

The increased expenditures were expected, said the authors of a study in the Feb. 13 issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association, but the lack of results weren't.
'This calls into question whether we're providing treatments to people who aren't going to benefit,' said study author Brook Martin, a research scientist in the department of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Washington, in Seattle. 'This calls for a need for more effectiveness studies and looking at which patients would benefit from treatments and diagnostic tests.'

'Spine problems are the most common reason why people of middle age have pain and disability, and we need to continue to search for better solutions because, although we have come up with newer techniques of treatments, we still have a large percentage of the of population with spine problems who are still disabled,' added Dr. Andrew Sherman, head of medical rehabilitation at the Spine Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine."