In contrast to acute pain that appears suddenly following a specific injury and often resolves within a few weeks, chronic pain persists over time (3-6 months up to many years) and is often resistant to medical treatments.

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Chronic pain may be anywhere in the body, or in multiple areas. The back is a commonly affected.
Back pain is one of the world’s biggest health problems
540 million people are affected globally at any one time and it's the main cause of disability worldwide.

Recently the Lancet (a medical journal) published papers written by a large, international group of experts who came together to raise awareness of the extent of the problem of low back pain and the evidence for recommended treatments. The authors were scathing about the widespread use of “inappropriate tests” and “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful treatments”.

Unfortunately the common approach to chronic pain is opioids, injections or surgery.
Martin Underwood, a professor at Warwick Medical School in the UK states what has long been known:
"There is a very poor relationship between changes on MRI scans and the presence or absence of low back pain."
He says that facet joint injections, a mix of anaesthetic and steroid injected into the small linking joints of the spine, “are very widely used in the public and private sectors. There is no evidence to support their use, but nevertheless the numbers done go up year on year.”
 

At an American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons conference in 2010, 100 surgeons were asked whether they would have surgery on their spine for nonspecific low back pain. “The answer – from all but one – was ‘absolutely not’.”

Prescription of  drugs for chronic pain has been rising every year, and Underwood states “It is a really important problem – it’s massive. Opioids don’t really work for long-term back pain, they make the pain worse in the end, and they have all sorts of other effects on how you think, your quality of life and your risk of falls or accidental overdose.”

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So How can Manual Osteopathy help?
There is a confusing array of treatment options available apart from the standard medical approach. With acute pain, most of these will have some benefit to a greater or lesser extent. However, chronic pain conditions are where osteopathy comes into its own as far as effectiveness goes.
A study quoted in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association states that
“Osteopathic manipulative treatment reduced pain and improved function in patients suffering from chronic, nonspecific low back pain. Further, patients reporting the worst pain and higher degrees of disability received the most substantial benefit from the treatments.”

Osteopathy is one of the most effective healthcare professions and one of the best options available in treating chronic pain.Often people seek help from an osteopath as a last resort after other failed treatments including surgery.

Osteopathic treatments are research proven, effective, hands-on, safe, gentle, non-invasive, low force and pain free.