Scientists have a developed the very first effective treatment that changes the way the brain and back communicate for people suffering from back pain. This 12-week course focuses on the nervous system instead of using pain killers or manipulation, and has managed to improve the condition of twice as many people than the usual conventional treatment.
The basic principle, which the scientists share comes from the simple concept of “mind over matter.” And since back pain has been named as the number one cause of the Global Disability Burden for the past 30 years, they believe that this concept was worth looking into.
Called sensorimotor retraining, researchers explain how this system can change the way people think about pain in their body, and process the sensations from their back and how they move it throughout the day.
For people that engaged in this system, they explained they were happier and that their backs actually felt better, which reported in them having a better quality of life. Moreover, they also said they felt improvements over a year later, while most current treatments for back pain don’t manage to help people for very long.
These study findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical association.
What they shared was the main difference is that sensorimotor retraining tends to view back pain as a problem within the nervous system that has the ability to be changed, unlike that of a disc, bone or muscle issue in the back.
The treatment was also based on research which shows how the nervous system of people who suffer from chronic back pain can change and behave in different ways, as compared to those who had a recent injury to their lower back. This is also included in the 12-week treatment to better educate the patients who are trying it out.
The team explains that since people are told that their back is vulnerable and needs more protection, it changes the way the back and the brain communicate so that their back gives signs and messages to share that it’s vulnerable.
As a result, it becomes weaker in the process, which the team hope that their treatment can stop this self-fulfilling pattern by correcting two problems that are more common in back pain, namely a hypersensitive pain system and bad communication between the brain and the back.
The study authors also share that people can now see that their back and brain do not communicate well, which forces them to slowly learn how to train their brain and body to fix the problem on their own.
Usually, back therapies focus on trying to fix something in the back right away, like loosening up a joint or joints, injecting a disc, or strengthening the back muscles.
In the study, 276 participants were split into two different groups, one who did the 12-week therapy and the other who were given bogus therapies for 12 weeks as well. Both of them were delivered by trained physiotherapists, exercise psychologists, and other types of experts.
Study author from the University of New South Wales, Professor James McAuley, shared, “If you compare the results to studies looking at opioid treatment versus placebo, the difference for that is less than one point out of 10 in pain intensity, and it is only short term and there is little improvement in disability. We see similar results for studies comparing manual therapy to sham (therapy) and exercise to sham (therapy).”
The findings were quite similar to another paper that was published in the PAIN journal earlier that year. The paper detailed the proposed mechanism where pain signals still move from the body to the brain, however, the individual doesn’t feel as much ‘ownership’ over the pain sensations, which made their pain and suffering less.
Senior author of the PAIN paper, Fadel Zeidan, PhD, who is also associate professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said, “One of the central tenets of mindfulness is the principle that you are not your experiences. You train yourself to experience thoughts and sensations without attaching your ego or sense of self to them, and we’re now finally seeing how this plays out in the brain during the experience of acute pain.”
Like many other studies, more research is needed but the outcome of this study has been promising so far, leading the way for a possible future unconventional type of treatment.
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