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Abstract
Background
Multimodal pain management (MPM) represents a central approach to avoiding surgery in patients with lumbar radiculopathy. Independent of the type of health system, cost effectiveness and socioeconomic factors are becoming increasingly important. This study investigated the medium-term influence of conservative MPM on health care utilization and socioeconomic factors.
Methods
This study compared subjective, objective, and socioeconomic factors of 60 patients after inpatient MPM because of lumbar radiculopathy, before and 1 year ± 2 weeks after treatment.
Results
Over the course of the 1-year follow-up, one-third of the patients had not required any conservative treatment in comparison to 100% of patients before MPM therapy. The number of patients requiring analgesics could be significantly reduced from 26 to 12, and the number of patients who did not require any analgesics had increased from 14 to 32. After 1 year, the number of patients who had to regularly contact a physician because of low back pain (once per month for 6 months) had been reduced from 58 to 27.
Conclusion
MPM is an effective approach to treating lumbar radiculopathy and reducing its negative influence on socioeconomic factors. Therapeutic benefits also include a decrease in health care utilization. Therefore, health care providers should place the mid-term success for patients and socioeconomic factors before the short-term costs of therapy.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Monika Schoell for the linguistic review of the manuscript. This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft] within the funding program Open Access Publishing.
Disclosure
The authors report no competing financial interests or conflicts of interest in this work.