Disrupted Self-Perception in People With Chronic Low Back Pain. Further Evaluation of the Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire.

Unlabelled: Several lines of evidence suggest that body perception is altered in people with chronic back pain. Maladaptive perceptual awareness of the back might contribute to the pain experience as well as serve as a target for treatment. The Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire (FreBAQ) is a simple questionnaire recently developed to assess back-specific altered self-perception.

Lumbar tactile acuity is near identical between sides in healthy pain-free participants.

A growing body of literature suggests that alterations in brain structure and function are a feature of chronic back pain. Tactile acuity is considered a clinical signature of primary somatosensory representation and offers a simple measure of cortical reorganisation. Clinical interpretation of test scores from an individual patient is hampered by variance in published normative values and less than ideal inter-rater reliability.

Acupuncture applied as a sensory discrimination training tool decreases movement-related pain in patients with chronic low back pain more than acupuncture alone: a randomised cross-over experiment.

Background: High-quality clinical evidence suggests that although acupuncture appears superior to usual care in the management of chronic low back pain, there is little meaningful difference between true and sham acupuncture. This suggests that the benefits of acupuncture are mediated by the placebo response. An alternative explanation is that sham acupuncture is an active treatment and shares a mechanism of action with traditionally applied acupuncture.