Margreth Grotle and three of our PhD-students (Kaja, Ørjan and Rikke) went to the Nordic Back Pain Seminar in Linköping, Sweden. Here is a brief summary of the seminar.
Low back pain is listed as the number one cause of living with disability worldwide, and lately low back pain has got a lot of attention in medical journals and in regular news.
The Nordic Back Pain Seminar were held as a follow-up to the Lancet series on Low Back Pain, and had focus on the burden of back pain in the Nordic countries, current research frontiers and future challenges. The seminar was located in Linköping in Sweden and was a combination of live lectures at the university and online talks and discussions.
Rachelle Buchbinder, Nadine Foster and John-Anker Zwart started the day with live lectures about “The global burden of back pain and the complexity of the best model of care”, “Best practice and current evidence on promising new directions within the field of back pain research” and “Chronic Low-back Pain. Susceptibility, risk factors and future research”.Next person out was Anthony Woolf with an online lecture about “Need for further research initiatives and implementation of current evidence. How to move forward”
After four good and thoughtful lectures and many discussions, the seminar was ended with online talks from Bart Koes, Han Anema, Jaro Karppinen and Lise Hestbaek.
The seminar was high quality, and I would recommend everyone working in the field of back pain to read the Lancet series on Low Back Pain, and to have a look at the YouTube version of this seminar.
I would also like to thank Birgitta Öberg from Linköping University, Jan Hartvigsen from the University of Southern Denmark and our own Margreth Grotle for organizing this seminar. You had a vision with this seminar - to strengthen the development of effective prevention and frontline interventions for back pain, as well as accelerate de-implementation of ineffective and outdated models of care. I think you (and we) are on the right track.
Low back pain – Time to pain attention and time to act!
Rikke