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Back pain: are we measuring the right things?

Published on December 31, 2015   34 min

A selection of talks on Neurology

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0:00
Hi, welcome to Back Pain: Are we Measuring the Right Things? A talk in the series "Current Thinking in Back Pain Management." I'm Robert Froud. I originally trained as a manual therapist before going to read medical statistics and epidemiology. I split my time between the Norwegian School of Health Sciences in Oslo, and Warwick Medical School in the UK.
0:25
So here's just a running order of the topics I'm going to cover in this talk. First of all I'm gonna do a very brief review of things we looked at in the previous talk entitled "How do we currently measure back pain?" It's not necessary to have seen that previous talk to understand or to follow this talk. I'm going to explore what's important to patients, what they value in terms of improvement in their back pain. Then I'm gonna look at some of the issues with their current outcome measures and things we measure, before going on to consider how we might improve outcome measurement more generally.
1:01
So in the previous talk we saw the most common outcome measures that are used in back pain trials. We saw that the visual analogue scale for pain is very commonly used, as is the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire, and Oswestry Disability Questionnaire, and also the numerical rating scale for pain. We reviewed some of the ideal properties of these instruments. We looked at some of the thinking that goes into making an instrument, and then how we ensure that it does what we need it to do. And primarily that is to remain stable when there is no change in the health domain of interest and to actually detect changes when there are important changes over time.
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Back pain: are we measuring the right things?

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