Predicting which patients will stick with physio after spinal surgery

Surgeons who perform spinal surgery on patients with back pain know that if a patient participates fully in physiotherapy after surgery, he or she has a much better chance of success than patients who don’t. Unfortunately, except for in cases where it may be obvious, doctors can’t usually tell who will follow up with physio and who won’t.

Now there’s a questionnaire to the rescue, according to an article published in the journal Spine. Researchers tested a questionnaire called the Patient Activation Measure (PAM) on 65 patients before they underwent spinal surgery. Six weeks later, the patients recorded how often they actually went to physiotherapy and their physiotherapists scored the patients’ participation.

According to the findings, the patients who scored high on the PAM were 38% more likely to attend and actively participate in their physiotherapy than those who scored lower on the PAM.

While this is an interesting finding, researchers now have to find a way to get the PAM scores higher and have the patients more interested in their own recovery.

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Tags: chronic pain blog, back pain, spinal surgery, physiotherapy after spinal surgery.