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Back pain and diabetes treatments revisited |
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Monday, 31 July 2006 |
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More and more people with back pain trust their doctor's recommendation and have surgery for an aching back.
Unfortunately new evidence suggests that surgery does not fix the problem over the long term any better than time. University of North Carolina's Dr. Norton Hadler cautions that pain clinics are full of people who have had back surgery and are now worse off. In the United States different regions, for instance, operations for spinal fusion have variable rate often 20 to 1 which suggests that this type of operation is more of fad. Many in the medical community, such as Dr. David Eddy are revisiting medical procedures and adopting statistics and multiple regression analysis to determine which procedures work and which do not. Dr. Eddy points to the changing treatment for diabetes care which was applied to 1 million Americans. Expensive conventional treatments for diabetes did little to prevent heart attacks and strokes which are complications of the disease. In contrast, a simple regimen of aspirin and generic drugs were more effective at lowering blood pressure and cholesterol which in turn resulting in reduced complications. |
