Six sessions, one pair of shoes, and 96 extra days
701 people were randomized, and the thing being tested was walking.
|
Method of the week The treatment under test was walking. That is the whole of it. I want to go carefully here, because I sat through thirty years of sales pitches and I know what a number that is too good looks like. This one is a proper trial. 701 people in Australia, split at random, followed for at least a year. And what one half of them got was a walking program.
Who was in it 701 adults who had recently got over an episode of back pain. Not people in pain on the day. People in the gap between episodes. Average age 54. Four in five were women. Half got the walking program. The other half got nothing at all, which is a harder comparison to beat than it sounds. What the program was Six sessions with a physical therapist, spread across six months. Six, over half a year. The target was walking five times a week, up to thirty minutes a day, built up gradually and fitted to the person. Alongside it, plain education about back pain. What it is, what it is not, and why moving is safe. That is the lot. No equipment. No gym. No clinic three times a week. And the walking was not brisk, or measured, or done in special shoes. It was walking. Meanwhile the control group carried on exactly as they were… which is what most of us do in the months after a back settles down. What happened The walking group went longer before their back went again, and the gap was not a small one. Half the walking group had reached 208 days before a recurrence. In the group who got nothing, half had gone by 112. That is about 96 extra days. A bit over three months of ordinary life, before the next episode. Put as risk, the chance of a recurrence at any given moment came down by 28%. And it was cheap. The trial costed it at about eight thousand Australian dollars for each year of good quality life gained, which in health economics is a bargain and not a splurge. The parts worth holding onto Four in five of the people in it were women, so reading it across to men is an assumption rather than a finding. And the comparison was against no treatment. That tells you walking beats nothing. It does not tell you walking beats swimming, or strength work, or a good therapist. Nobody was blinded either. You cannot hide from a person whether they have been told to go walking. Even so, this is the kind of trial I trust most. A cheap thing, a real comparison, a long follow up… and a result that did not need a press release to sound like something.
That second card matters and I nearly read past it. If your back is bad today, this trial is not about you yet. It is about the weeks after it settles… which is exactly when most of us stop doing anything at all.
Here is to five walks a week, |