Common Complementary And Alternative Medical Treatment...

Introduction Persistent and costly to treat, chronic low back pain is an important public health issue, with the most common Complementary and Alternative Medical treatment being yoga (Khan et al., 2016). In the randomized control trial by Sherman et al. (2011), the researchers studied stretching and yoga as an affordable and universal treatment for chronic low back pain. The trial had three intervention groups, a stretching group, yoga group, and self-care group, that were followed over 6 months, with a 3 month intervention and a separate 3 month follow up period, and interviews at the baseline, 6 weeks in (midway through the intervention), 12 weeks in (the end of the intervention), and at 26 weeks (3 months post intervention). Because†¦show more content†¦However, in this study the follow up interview was completed 3 months after the intervention finished. In another study comparing yoga to usual care provided by the doctor, there was significant improvement in the back functionality and decrease in pain after a year compared to usual care (Tilbrook et al., 2011). Because the study did not follow up with the three groups past 6 months, this study was not able to say whether stretching or yoga was a better treatment for chronic low back pain over time. What the researchers could do to change the limitation into a positive and innovative addition to the study would be to go back and interview the study participants at 1 year from the start of the trial and another year after that. A common method for studies like this is to have the participants return at the halfway point, at the end of the intervention, and 6 months after the end of the intervention (Williams et al., 2009). If the study was to have a longer follow up than the customary amount, it would change the study from examining the short term effect of yoga is on an individual’s chronic low back pain, and extend it to the long term effect on an individual’s chronic low back pain. It would be a pioneering prospective study on how yoga affects chronic low back pain over the course of years rather than 6 months. For a study to be