Back pain treatments from a specialist

Your GP, specialist or physiotherapist may recommend extra treatments if they don’t think your pain will improve with self-help measures alone.

These may include:

• group exercise classes – where you’re taught exercises to strengthen your muscles and improve your posture
• psychological therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – this can be a useful part of treatment  especially if you’re struggling to cope with the pain
• occassionally (but not often) manual therapy – treatments such as manipulating the spine and massage, are offered by physiotherapists, or osteopaths but people usually need to make behavioural changes in addition to this

Remember in Camden you can see a physiotherpist without seeing your GP first. If you would like to see a therapist for manual therapy only, you’ll usually need to pay for private treatment.

Surgery is generally only considered in the small number of cases where back pain is caused by a specific medical condition.