Exercise Training May Ease Chronic Back Pain

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For workers disabling back pain, a supervised exercise program combining resistance training to strengthen the muscles of the lower back with exercises designed to improve flexibility and coordination may help them return to work, a study shows.

A look back at 314 consecutive individuals with chronic back pain attributed largely to work-related causes who participated in the 8- to 15-week exercise program showed that many of them saw improvement in their ability to move and had less pain.

The active exercise program worked better than popular passive back pain remedies such as ultrasound, electrical stimulation and hot packs.

"Restorative exercise was effective in improving self-reported functional ability and reducing pain intensity in a sample of patients with spinal complaints," Dr. Vert Mooney of the Spine and Sport Foundation in San Diego, told the annual meeting of the North American Spine Society in Philadelphia.

After completing the rehabilitation program, the workers demonstrated a modest but significant 13 percent improvement in functional ability, which may be enough to send them back to work, Mooney said in a statement issued by the Society.

Two-thirds of the workers who were deemed "unemployable" before embarking on the exercise program improved enough after the program to become theoretically "employable."

"Most people reduce their activity when they're in pain," Mooney noted in a statement. "By increasing their strength with guidance and progressive exercise, the pain goes down."

The results of this study support a growing body of evidence on the benefits of functional rehabilitation in patients with chronic low back pain. It seems that more-intensive training yields greater improvements than less-intensive regimens.