PTs Provide Social Support for Patients with Back Pain

Interesting article just published about PTs being identified by patients as providing the greatest amount of social support for patients with back pain.

John

J Behav Med. 2006 Nov 3; [Epub ahead of print]
Specificity of social support for back pain patients: do patients care who provides what?
Masters KS, Stillman AM, Spielmans GI.
Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, 430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse,
NY, 13244-2340, USA, kemaster@syr.edu.

This study examined low back pain patients' (N=50) perceptions of what they
considered to be helpful and unhelpful social support from various sources over
the previous six months. Among types of social support, tangible support was
most likely to be rated as helpful, whereas emotional support was the type of
support most likely to be rated as unhelpful. Patients reported only rare
instances of dissatisfaction with tangible support across various providers.
Among support sources, instances of tangible support from physicians, and
emotional support from friends, family, and spouses were recalled as most
helpful. Physical therapists were named as providing the greatest amount of all
three types of social support and were rated as rarely providing unhelpful
social support. These findings suggest that the desirability of different types
of social support varies as a function of the source of support and indicate
that physical therapists are perceived by back pain patients as particularly
helpful in their provision of social support.

PMID: 17082973 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Note:  This post will also be posted in the "Orthopaedics' and 'Pain' groups on MyPTConnect. All comments and questions should be added there.  The comments feature on the blog is turned off for this post.  Email us at info@myptspace1T.com if you have any questions.  See you on MyPTConnect!