Most Back Pain Treatments Are Useless. Here’s What Actually Helps.

You’ve been through a thousand different treatments for your lower back pain and nothing seems to work. In your darkest moments, you think maybe you’re just going to have to deal with this for the rest of your life if no treatment seems to do anything to alleviate the pain.

According to depressing new research, you might actually be right about that.

Back pain affects one in four American adults and is one of the leading causes of disability in the world. A new study published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine poured over the data from 301 clinical trials involving 56 noninvasive treatments for low back pain—all to determine which treatments actually work.

As someone who has to deal with some lower back pain every once in a while, the results are disheartening, to say the least. Only one treatment seems to provide short-term relief from acute lower back pain—anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and aspirin.

Almost No Treatments Alleviate Back Pain, According To Science

For longer-term chronic pain, five treatments were found to be moderately successful: warming creams (E.g., Icy Hot), taping, exercise, chiropractic adjustments, and antidepressants.

Toss in the ibuprofen and aspirins and you have only about six lower back pain treatments that seem to have had any effect on the study participants. And none of them are a silver bullet.

As for therapies with inconclusive evidence of effectiveness, you’ve got heat, acupressure, and massage, all of which sound more relaxing than they are solid treatments for lower back pain.

The study found that there is evidence that exercise can reduce chronic back pain… but it only reduces that back pain by 7.9 points on a pain scale of 0 to 100. Exercise, if done right, can help you strengthen your core and your back muscles to support your spinal alignment, just don’t expect your problems to instantly melt away.

Core exercises like planks help strengthen muscles that support the spine while being fairly low-intensity. But no matter what you do, do it knowing it may alleviate some pain but none of it is a cure.