HEALING PAIN - LATEST CLINICAL TRIAL WITH SENSORIMOTOR INTERVENTION (SEPTEMBER 2022)

Changing the brain is better than prescription drugs for treating back pain. 

A new clinical trial provides more evidence that a change of mindset, not prescription drugs, is key to eliminating nagging (chronic) back pain.  A paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association, as reported in the London Times, showed long-standing back pain as a ‘modifiable problem of the nervous system rather than a disc, bone or muscle problem’.

The researchers offered people with lower back pain a 12 week ‘sensorimotor retraining programme’ designed to change how people think about pain, how they process sensory information from the back, and how they move it during activities. 

People offered the treatment rated their improvement as better than a control group given the same time with healthcare professionals but only sham treatments such as lasers applied to their backs. It also looked as if the improvements were sustained over the long term – twice as many people undergoing the senorimotor treatment completely recovered.

This is good news for the 10 million people in the UK who report persistent back pain and elsewhere as the condition is the leading cause of disability globally. 

The authors say more research is needed to replicate the results and to test the treatment in different settings and populations.  In the meantime, they hope to begin training more professionals in the technique within a year.

For more about the science behind this development go to the March 2022 Blog and attend the September 23rd Wales training event: Healing pain with EMDR – what you need to know about pain, the brain and treatment.

About the authors