14 DAY TRIAL // A study recently published in the European Spine Journal documents how, following their being given antibiotics, several volunteers found that their lower back pain ceased to bother them all that much.
The specialists who decided to give the idea of treating lower back pain with the help of antibiotics explain that they did so because roughly 40% of all chronic lower back pain cases are allegedly caused by bacteria.
Therefore, administering antibiotics seemed like the right thing to do.
Sources say that the experiments carried out by these researchers with the help of volunteers boiled down to their asking a total of 162 volunteers to undergo the recommended treatment for a period of 100 days.
Of these volunteers, some were given placebo and others actually received antibiotics. All were asked to take the medication three times per day.
4 of the people participating in this study had to stop the treatment after the medication they were taking caused them to develop various gastrointestinal issues.
By the looks of it, as many as 80% of the people taking part in this study reported an improvement in their lower back pain as a result of their having been treated with antibiotics.
“In people who received the placebo, nothing happened. People on the antibiotics attained highly clinically significant improvement,” explained specialist Hanne B. Albert of the University of Southern Denmark while taking part in a press conference in London.
The clinically significant improvement Professor Hanne B. Albert is referring to is the volunteers' no longer experiencing very high intensity lower back pain.
Furthermore, their leg pain improved to a considerable extent, and the volunteers no longer had to take as many back pain-related days off work as they usually would have.
Despite the encouraging findings of this research, specialists warn that an antibiotics regimen might not be appropriate to everybody and that further investigations are needed.