An Effective, Minimally Invasive Way to Treat Chronic Lumbar Pain

摘要

Once in a while, a research paper comes along that is potentially game-changing. One such paper may change our view of chronic back pain treatment. A group of Chinese medical doctors (Peng, et al.) conducted a placebo-controlled study in which they took a group of 136 patients with chronic lower back pain and MRI evidence of degenerative disc disease and performed discograms on them. They first excluded patients with lumbar disc herniation, canal stenosis, spondelolesthesis, instability, disc degeneration with endplate Modic changes, inflammatory arthritis, neurological disease, tumor, infection, or depression. As any good researcher should, they were very careful, very specific with their selection of patients, attempting to have a tight criterion to determine who would be the optimal candidates.