Jeff LangmaidFounder, The Evidence Based Chiropractor

How Boosting Self-Efficacy Cuts Pain-Med Use (Major Reduction)

13 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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Jeff Langmaid presents results from an 8-week program where boosting self-efficacy cut pain medication use. Non-users dropped from 15% to 6%, and baseline users fell from 76% to 54%. Many kept taking pills anyway, driven by habit and fear the pain would return.

Questions this video answers

From 15% to 6% (absolute risk of medication dropped).

From 76% to 54% (absolute risk of medication dropped).

Eight weeks (referred to as an "eight week evidence based program").

Chapters

Getting back to some of the numbers here. When self efficacy improved during the program, the absolute risk of medication dropped. So for baseline non users from 15% to 6% for baseline users 76% to 54%. And that's a massive reduction especially for the people that were already using the medication. So this highlights a couple really important things. One, medication behavior is really sticky. You want to think about a sticky product. Medication is one of those. Once patients were using medications, most of them kept using the medications even after an eight week evidence based program. And that's not a knock on the program. This is a true reflection of human behavior that's again impactful and important for us to understand. Pain Meds do become habit for many people. They represent a sense of control. The person can take the med, they can look at the med, there's control aspect there. So a lot of people really fear reducing anything related to it because they have a big, big question in their head and that question is what if the pain comes back?