Clinical guidelines for lumbar spinal stenosis recommend exercise and manual therapy before pills. A Danish study of over 7,000 patients tracked whether chiropractic care reduced their use of pain medication.
We know that the clinical guidelines do not, not generally recommend analgesics as the primary strategy for lumbar spinal stenosis. The guidelines instead really emphasize non-pharmacological care, things like patient education, exercise, manual therapy, structured follow-up. Sounding familiar? A lot of what we do as chiropractors, and that's exactly why this study is so relevant. And this was a large nationwide cohort study out of Denmark. They looked at more than 7,000 patients with lumbar spinal stenosis who had entered a standardized chiropractic care program. And really the question that they were trying to answer, the researchers, were what happened to prescribed analgesic use before, during, and after that chiropractic program?
