New Study Shows That Cognitive Therapy Helps Ease Back Pain

John M. Grohol, Psy.D. has an interesting post on his blog that discusses how people with chronic lower back pain can reap as much benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy as they do from physical therapy. This is the finding of a new Dutch study suggests.

Low back pain sufferers reported improvements in function and levels of pain whether they received 10 weeks of physical therapy or underwent 10 weeks of cognitive therapy, compared to those who received no treatment, researchers says. However, those on a combination of cognitive and physical therapy did no better than those on either treatment alone.

"People with disabling low back pain should be (active), and this can either be achieved by physical training or cognitive behavioral training," says the study's lead author, Dr. Rob Smeets, a consultant in rehabilitation medicine at the Rehabilitation Centre Blixembosch in the Netherlands.

"Physical training is a little bit more preferable for people with a relatively low level of disability at the start of treatment, but the cognitive behavioral treatment is to be preferred when people are moderately to severely disabled," he says.

Results of the study appear in the Jan. 20 issue of the open access journal Musculoskeletal Disorders from BioMed Central. You can read his full post at http://psychcentral.com