It was a big YES!
This new, single blinded placebo controlled study, conducted by the Faculty of Medicine at
BACKGROUND: Chiropractic is a common treatment option for low back pain. Numerous clinical trials have attempted to evaluate its effectiveness for different subgroups of acute and chronic low back pain previously, but the efficiency of maintenance chiropractic in chronic non-specific low back pain (LBP) has never been studied.
In this study, 60 patients with chronic, non-specific LBP lasting at least 6 months were randomised into three groups:
1. One third of patients received 12 treatments of ‘sham’ chiropractic over a one-month period.
2. One third of patients received 12 treatments of chiropractic during a one-month period, with no follow-up care during the next nine months, and;
3. One third of patients received 12 chiropractic visits during the first month, followed by “maintenance” chiropractic every two weeks, for the next nine months.
To determine any difference among these three care groups, researchers measured pain and disability scores, generic health status, and back-specific patient satisfaction at baseline, and at 1-month, 4-months, 7-months, and at 10-months.
RESULTS: Patients in the ‘real’ chiropractic groups (groups 2 & 3) experienced significantly lower pain and disability scores than the sham group at the end of the first 1-month period.
At the 10-month follow-up, only the maintenance group maintained improvements in pain and disability, while the group that only received 1-months care had reverted to their pre-treatment pain and disability levels.
CONCLUSIONS: This is the first medically managed trial that clearly demonstrates that maintenance care provides significant benefits to those who suffer from chronic low back pain.
This study re-confirms Descarreaux’s virtually identical 2004 JMPT study, which concluded that “This experiment suggests that maintenance spinal manipulations after intensive manipulative care is beneficial to patients to maintain subjective post-intensive treatment disability levels”.
It also confirms the findings of Dr. Ron L. Rupert, in his ground-breaking JMPT article, titled Maintenance Care: Health Promotion Services Administered to US Chiropractic Patients Aged 65 and Older, Part II, which found that:
“The cost of health care for patients receiving Maintenance Chiropractic (MC) in this study was far less than that for patients of similar age in the general population, despite the doubling of physician visits (medical plus chiropractic). The greatest difference in health care costs with patients receiving MC was in the areas of nursing care and, especially, hospital care. This reduced need for hospital and nursing home services has recently been corroborated by the research of Coulter et al..” [22]
SOURCE:Spine (
Does Maintained Spinal Manipulation Therapy for Chronic Non-specific Low Back Pain Result in Better Long Term Outcome?
