Complementary and alternative medical therapies for chronic low back pain: What treatments are patients willing to try?

doi:10.1186/1472-6882-4-9

PMC full text:

BMC Complement Altern Med. 2004; 4: 9.

Published online 2004 Jul 19. doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-4-9

Copyright/License ►Request permission to reuse: Copyright © 2004 Sherman et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Table 3

Knowledge of, Experience with, Expectations about, and Willingness to Try Five CAM Therapies*

	Acupuncture (N = 249)	Chiropractic (N = 249)	Massage (N = 249)	Meditation (N = 249)	T'ai Chi (N = 249)
Knowledge about Therapy (%)
1 – 2 (1="no knowledge")	69	44	52	72	91
3	17	22	24	15	6
4 – 5 (5="a lot of knowledge")	14	34	24	13	3
Ever tried therapy (%)	18	54	38	27	8
Ever tried therapy for LBP (%)	11	45	24	7	0.4
Median helpfulness for LBP among prior users (0 to 10 scale)	5	6	7	5	**
Pain or harm reported by prior users (%)	13	23	13	5	16
Median expectation of helpfulness for current LBP (0 to 10 scale)	5	5	7	3	5
Did not provide expectation rating (%)	25	10	9	12	24
High expectations of helpfulness for current LBP (7 to 10 on 0 to 10 scale) (%)	19	28	48	15	16
Very likely to try therapy if primary care provider thought reasonable and no extra cost (%)	64	51	69	27	41
Very likely to try therapy if primary care provider thought reasonable and $10 co-pay (%)	51	42	56	NA	NA

NA = Not Asked. * Each column refers to a specific therapy and the specific question about the therapy is shown in the first column. ** Only 1 person had tried t'ai chi for low back pain previously. All variables, except expectations of helpfulness of current LBP (where % are given in the table) have missing values for < 5% of respondents.