Mark Hancock
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2018
last heard Jun 2018
Mark Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
What drove this series of papers in The Lancet was primarily the fact that low back pain doesn't seem to get the attention of a lot of other conditions, but we know it's actually the number one cause of disability around the world.
We had a feeling from some of the literature that had been published that a lot of people were receiving the wrong types of treatments, the treatments that aren't recommended in guidelines, and that's very much one of the strong findings from the series of papers.
a pattern the researchers found throughout the developed world.
The best examples of treatments that seem to be being used excessively and are potentially dangerous include things like spinal surgery, particularly complex fusion surgeries, spinal injections and also the use of opioids.
So these all carry quite significant risks of harm and again there's not strong evidence of these being highly effective interventions.
That's a great question.
For some forms of back pain, they are appropriate.
In very limited cases, though, and at the moment, they're being very, very widely used.
The rate of spinal injections has gone up astronomically over the last 10 or 20 years, and there's been a lot of controversy about this.
We and other people around the world have looked at this, and the consensus seems to be that spinal injections have very, very small effects that are probably not on average useful or important effects that patients would notice.
So again, we're recommending these not being standard treatments and being used maybe in very select cases.
But the problem is that they're just becoming very standard and very common.
The rates have doubled or tripled over fairly short periods of
We absolutely need the clinicians that are looking after people with back pain to rethink about how they're managing back pain.
But there's really strong evidence that a lot of clinicians aren't following the recommendations.
GPs?
It's GPs, physios and chiropractors and arguably anybody that's treating low back pain.
Absolutely.
So the recommendations for early management of back pain are largely about self-management and really encouraging people to stay active, which goes against a lot of people's intuition.
In the past, there was a strong belief that when people had back pain, the most appropriate thing to do was rest.
Showing 1–20 of 55 · page 1 of 3
Next →