Physiotherapy students’ experiences of managing their own persistent low back pain: an interview study

Abstract

Background

Provision of information and advice from a physiotherapist is often assumed to be translated into action by a patient with low back pain (LBP). However, this assumption is questionable. The aim of this study is to explore physiotherapy students’ individual experiences with managing persistent low back pain.

Methods

This is a qualitative interview study using individual semi-structured interviews based on a phenomenological approach to explore physiotherapy students’ management of their own low back pain. Participants had to have non-specific low back pain for more than three months. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using thematic text analysis.

Results

Ten participants with a median age of 25 years were included. The analysis revealed three themes important for the participants’ management of their own persistent LBP: impact on everyday life, knowledge about LBP and ability to self-manage.

Conclusions

Self-managing persistent low back pain can still be a challenge even when possessing professional knowledge about pain. This indicates that only providing patients with information and advice does not lead to the expected behaviours, but that healthcare professionals need to listen to their patients and tailor advice and strategies to meet physical, psychological and social challenges.

Keywords:

• Physical therapy modalities
• low back pain
• chronic pain
• students
• self-management

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study follows the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. The North Denmark Region Committee on Health Research Ethics has stated that according to Danish law their approval is not needed for this study (2022-000764). All participants provided written informed consent.

Author contributions

MGE, SLI, SSK and TSJ conceptualised the study and contributed equally to the work. AR supervised MGE, SLI, SSK and TSJ during data collection and the analysis. AR and NR validated the analysis. MGE, SLI, SSK, TSJ, ATS, NR and AR drafted the manuscript in collaboration. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study did not receive external funding.