People strongly value physical therapies for low back pain over doing nothing, even when effects are very small: a discrete choice experiment

Review written by Ben Cormack info

Key Points

  1. The type of treatment did not seem to significantly influence patients’ decision making.
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Currently there are many treatment options available to people with low back pain, with many providing a similar level of effectiveness on pain intensity. One measure used to try to determine this was the “smallest worthwhile effect,” which this study defined as the smallest improvement in symptoms, compared to no intervention, that a patient considers will justify the costs and inconveniences of a health intervention. Another measure used was “willingness to pay threshold”, that the authors defined as the maximum price at or below which an individual will pay for goods or services.

Therefore, this study aimed to quantify what influences people’s decisions around which treatments to receive.

Currently there are many treatment options available to people with low back pain, with many providing a similar level of effectiveness on pain intensity.
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A key message from this study is that people are willing to pay a substantial amount of money for almost no effect.

METHODS

This study used a discrete choice experiment to answer the study question. A discrete choice experiment is a method that presents people with hypothetical scenarios to understand their preferences for products or services based on their attributes (1). These scenarios

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