 I am happy to have the opportunity to present the poster of my thematic analysis of clinician interviews at the first annual German Postdoc Network Conference near Munich, Germany. This poster was originally slated to be presented at the 2025 EFIC (European Pain Federation) Conference in Lyon, France, but major upheavals in travel and funding made it impossible for me to attend that conference.
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The number of adolescents with nonspecific persistent back pain appears to be on the rise. Evidence for the rehabilitation of adolescent back-pain patients is limited, and guidance for treating adolescent nonspecific persistent back pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon may not be widespread.
Therefore, my supervisors and I agreed that a deeper understanding of the practices, perspectives, and beliefs of healthcare practitioners treating this group of adolescents would be an appropriate way to gather on-the-ground experiences of clinicians and inform future intervention research. To do this, I developed an interview guide and undertook individual, semi-structured interviews with 10 clinicians (eight chartered physiotherapists, one nurse, and one psychologist) who currently treat or have treated adolescents with nonspecific persistent back pain. Because this was an exploratory, descriptive study, reflexive thematic analysis was used to code the interview transcripts and generate relevant themes. The five themes that captured the practices, perspectives, and beliefs of interviewed clinicians were: 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. When I started my doctoral program, I didn’t know that people under the age of 18 were experiencing persistent or chronic back pain. I’d helped many adults (usually over the age of 40) to eliminate their back pain as part of the fitness programs I used to teach. But kids? Not in a million years did I think the problem could be affecting them as well.
But the research was clear: More and more kids are reporting episodes of back pain and going to the doctor because of the pain. We know from decades of research on adults that nonspecific back pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon that can be meaningfully affected by individuals’ beliefs, emotions, lifestyle factors, and family and social relationships. Recent guidelines for the treatment of adolescents with persistent nonspecific back pain, as well as those for youth with mixed chronic pain, strongly recommend multidisciplinary care in which adolescents receive treatment for both mind and body. They also recommend against surgical or pharmacological interventions. Thus, with my first PhD study—a systematic scoping review—I set out to (1) examine the interventions evaluated in randomized trials for adolescents with persistent back pain to determine if they correspond to current guidelines, and (2) to reveal future research priorities. |