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1st January 2010 - NICE guidelines

Hampstead Chiropractic Clinic welcomes recent guidelines from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) on Lower Back Pain. As many of you may have seen in the media recently, manipulative therapy got the thumbs up from NICE with regard to treatment of chronic low back pain.

NICE has recommended up to nine sessions of spinal manipulation or 10 sessions of acupuncture to be provided for people with persistent, non-specific, low back pain over a 12 week period. £16m worth of NHS funds are to be allocated for the use of ‘manipulative therapies’ such as chiropractic and osteopathy as a result of these guidelines. A further £24.4m of will be made available for the use of acupuncture.

The provision of NHS funding for chiropractic is a major endorsement of its usage in diagnosing, treating and preventing lower back disorders. It also provides GPs and patients with greater choice of future treatment options. So far, it is not yet clear whether the NHS would pay for patients to visit private Chiropractors or Osteopaths.

Back pain remains the most common cause of work-based absence. The condition is estimated to cost the UK economy an estimated £5.1bn every year, including £1bn of NHS money and is responsible for the loss around 5 million working days annually. Back pain affects one in three adults in the UK every year and leads to 2.6 million people visiting their GP.

We are fortunate that our clinic provides spinal rehabilitation, managed by two particuarly excellant sports therapists, who can devise tailored exercise and rehabilitation programmes. NICE has proposed such exercise programmes to be implemented as part of its Lower Back Pain guidelines.

So you never know, you could be getting your Chiropractic treatment on the NHS sometime in the future!

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