Treating Chronic Low Back Pain

Excerpt

Low back disorders limit a patient's functional and vocational activities and create a major problem when costs for disability evaluation and compensation payments are considered.¹ Clinical approaches to the management of chronic low back pain patients include: exercise, surgery, chemotherapy, analgesic blocks, and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation.^{2, 3} These treatments, however, often fail to bring relief; therefore, clinicians need to seek better methods of attending to this problem.⁴

Electromyographic biofeedback training may be a very effective treatment method for muscle reeducation.⁵ Although EMG biofeedback has been used in conjunction with relaxation training to reduce muscle activity in patients with chronic low back pain,⁶ to date, the use of this modality to induce voluntary changes in their standing positions has not been explored. Therefore, we selected a patient with chronic back pain in order to study the effects of EMG biofeedback training to his low back musculature during stationary positions (standing and sitting) and trunk movements.…