Article

Evaluation and management of chronic low back pain is often a challenge. Many treatments are available, each with its own unique profile of benefits, harms, costs, and burdens. In addition, the evidence supporting different treatments is variable. All these factors make it difficult for clinicians to know the best options for management. Clinical practice guidelines are a type of preprocessed evidence that can help clinicians make decisions based on the best available research evidence. However, guidelines can be misleading if they do not follow methods to insure comprehensiveness, methodologic rigor, and transparency. This article explains how clinicians can determine whether a clinical practice guideline is trustworthy, reviews the methods used in several recent higher-quality, multidisciplinary guidelines on evaluation and management of chronic low back pain, describes their recommendations, and highlights areas of discrepancy between the guidelines

Langue : ANGLAIS