|
Parents are known to look online for health information, both for themselves and their children. Treatment for adolescent nonspecific back pain is primarily focused on biomedical and structural causes that may not address the root causes of the pain. Thus, parents may seek out health information online when their child has persistent nonspecific back pain to better understand treatment options for the condition. Support groups on social media are popular with parents of a particular age, and we know that many people of all ages seek health information by scrolling socials. But studying social media in a rigorous way is incredibly difficult. Therefore, we stuck to websites that are easily searchable. To determine what a parent might see when they seek treatment advice online, I and my colleagues undertook a descriptive cross-sectional analysis of websites, with additional assessments of website credibility and readability. This study was designed and completed before the internet was overtaken by artificial intelligence. (It really was not that long ago!). Therefore, we completed Google searches using 5 English-speaking countries’ top-level domains (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, and the United States). Results were screened for eligibility according to a systematic search strategy. Prior to completing the searches, I and my coauthors spent weeks developing a comprehensive codebook of potential treatment codes. Website content related to the treatment of adolescent back pain was then analyzed via directed manifest content analysis. The a priori codebook included 34 treatment-related codes; 9 additional codes were inductively created during analysis. Website credibility was assessed using the JAMA Benchmark. Readability was assessed via Flesch Kincaid Reading Level. To ensure rigor, the study protocol was registered on Open Science Framework before we began the first step in codebook development. Of 245 web pages served up by Google that appeared on the first 2 pages of results in each country, 48 were eligible and analyzed. Of 43 treatment codes, 37 were present in at least one web page. That’s a LOT of variability. It should seem obvious even from this statistic that people don’t really know what to say when asked how to treat adolescent nonspecific back pain. The 5 most frequently identified codes present on websites were:
Codes related to psychosocial or relational strategies were barely present:
These results, although disappointing from a biopsychosocial perspective, were not surprising. Parents of adolescents with nonspecific back pain are being encouraged to continue engaging with clinicians to find a biomedical or structural diagnosis for their teen’s persistent back pain. In addition, nonspecific persistent back pain is not differentiated from acute back pain in online sources, even though we know that the two conditions are entirely different physiologically. This analysis reveals that public-facing web pages with recommendations for treating adolescent nonspecific back pain are not citing the most recent, high-quality research. They contain almost no mention of the biopsychosocial model. Thus, parents may be surprised when a clinician recommends a course of treatment that addresses psychosocial factors. Both this research and the scoping review on randomized trials for this population show that the ethos regarding nonspecific back pain needs to catch up with our current understanding of such pain as biopsychosocial in origin. Hauber SD, Robinson K, Fechner R, Pate JW, O’Sullivan K. Credibility, readability and content analysis of treatment recommendations for adolescents with nonspecific back pain published on consumer websites. European Journal of Pain. 2024;28(9):1571-1584. doi:10.1002/ejp.2282 Click the image below to read the full article for free.  Click the image to read the full open-access article.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |