Exploring Integrative Medicine in Swedish Primary Care
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Details and patient eligibility
About
Research over the last years have reported an increased popularity of complementary therapies (CTs) and an integration of CTs into mainstream medical settings, health care organizations and insurance plans. These trends may present both new challenges and new opportunities for health care provision. In Sweden and elsewhere, major challenges include the great variety and quality of CT provision within health care and a lack of national and international recommendations of how integrations of CTs with conventional care should be modelled, i.e. lack of conceptual models for delivering integrative medicine (IM). This may partly be a result of a scarce evidence base in support of IM provision within public health care services, e.g. lack of IM compared to usual care in randomised clinical trials. It remains largely unknown whether comprehensive models of IM are clinically or cost effectively different from conventional care provision.
Back and neck pain are costly, conventionally managed in primary care and two of the most common conditions treated by CTs. We have developed a comprehensive collaborative consensus model for IM adapted to Swedish primary care. The aim of this pilot study was to explore the feasibility of a pragmatic randomised clinical trial to investigate the effectiveness of the IM model versus conventional primary care in the management of patients with non-specific back/neck pain.
Full description
Study objectives included the exploration of recruitment and retention rates, patient and care characteristics, clinical differences and effect sizes between groups, selected outcome measures and power calculations to inform the basis of a full-scale trial.
Enrollment
Sex
Ages
Volunteers
Inclusion criteria
- Back/neck pain with or without headache for at least two weeks and at least three times per week
- Resident of Stockholm County
- Literate in Swedish
- Willing and able to comply with study requirements
Exclusion criteria
- Specific pathology and severe causes of back/neck pain such as malignant disease, vertebral fractures and severe or progressive neurological symptoms.
Trial design
Primary purpose
Allocation
Interventional model
Masking
80 participants in 2 patient groups
Trial contacts and locations
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Data sourced from clinicaltrials.gov
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