Just Shrug Off Back Pains, Study Suggests

Here’s the latest treatment for a backache: Ignore it.

A new study concludes that simply going about your business is the best way to deal with sudden back pain.

Many people take to their beds when a backache strikes. Others do stretching exercises. To see which strategy is best, researchers in Finland set up an experiment with 186 city workers complaining of back trouble.

They randomly assigned them to go to bed for two days, do stretching exercises or simply stick to their regular routines as best they could.

“Avoiding bed rest and maintaining ordinary activity as tolerated led to the most rapid recovery,” the researchers wrote.

The findings, published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, are unlikely to surprise many experts. The conclusions are similar to those reached by an expert panel last December assembled by the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research.

The latest study was conducted by Dr. Antti Malmivaara and others at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki.

It found that those who carried on as usual got better faster and missed less work.

The benefits were obvious during three months of follow-up but were especially apparent after the first week.

By this time, just 20 percent of the patients told to continue as usual were still away from work, compared with 36 percent of those exercising and 41 percent of the ones assigned to bed rest.