Mary Franz - Dec 01st, 2010
If you suffer from chronic neck pain, you might be making the same mistakes as the patients who participated in a recent study published in Arthritis Care Research. Researchers found that although many patients sought care for neck pain (90 percent), the prescribed treatments were not necessarily the most effective kinds of care available.
Researchers conducted a telephone survey in North Carolina, and collected information from 135 people who met the criteria for chronic neck pain. They were questioned on their treatment plans over the past year.
More than 1/3 of the study participants said they used or had used prescription pain medications, some as strong as oxycodone. Many also used heat and cold therapy as well as massage. Expensive diagnostic tools such as MRIs were another common treatment. The problem? Medications, heat and cold therapy are not proven to effectively treat chronic neck pain. There is also little evidence to show that MRIs are accurate when diagnosing chronic neck pain.
In addition, the study showed that fewer than 4 percent of the survey responders had utilized rehabilitation conditioning/work hardening or acupuncture, both of which appear to be effective in treating chronic neck pain.
And while less than half of the participants had sought chiropractic care for their chronic neck pain, chiropractic care is recognized as being a safe and effective treatment plan for chronic neck pain. A Swedish study found that after 5 weeks of chiropractic care, chronic neck pain patients had a significant decrease in pain compared to the control group, which received no chiropractic care.
(1) Goode A, et al "Prevalence, practice patterns and evidence for chronic neck pain" Arthritis Care Res 2010; DOI:10.1002/acr.20270.
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