Back Pain: Costs Up…But No Relief

February 13, 2008 | Filed Under Low Back Pain | No Comments

Back pain is an expensive public health issue. Treatment of back pain costs about $86 billion a year, and that doesn’t even cover the costs in lost work, productivity, and quality of life.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that we’re spending more on back pain than ever…and patients aren’t getting better:

Higher spending on prescription drugs, more advanced diagnostic tests and more frequent outpatient visits helped drive the increases, as well as greater patient demand for treatment and more use of spinal fusion surgery and instruments, they said.

Yet, for all of the spending, they found people with spine problems actually felt worse.

The authors of the study, Dr. Brook Martin, from the University of Washington described the problem:

“Health care expenditures for people with spinal problems have increased substantially — 65 percent since 1997. Within that, we found pharmaceutical expenditures have increased 171 percent.”

“If we are spending that much money on spine problems, we would expect to see improvements in the health of the population,” Martin said in a telephone interview.

“What this study shows is we are not seeing commensurate improvements among people with spine problems.”

Here’s the link to the article on MSNBC.com - Back pain treatment getting pricier

The study finds that most of the increased costs are coming from invasive procedure — procedures that aren’t that effective.

The study does not discuss the benefits of chiropractic treatment for back pain. Chiropractic has been shown in many studies to be effective, safe, and much less expensive than medical intervention in the treatment of back pain.

With our health care system in crisis, hopefully we’ll move away from ineffective and expensive treatments and towards safe and affordable chiropractic care.