Back pain is the most common reason patients seek care from their primary care physician and Physical Therapist. Mend’s clinicians in our Boulder Physical Therapy and Lafayette Physical Therapy clinics specialize in the treatment of this painful diagnosis.
Physical Therapists in our clinics utilize hands on treatments, including mobilization and spinal manipulation, dry needling, and high level exercise. These interventions provide the fastest relief to patients and most importantly help prevent the return of low back pain symptoms. A recent study highlights how the optimal rehabilitation of low back pain can also reduce risk of future lower extremity injuries.
Foster and colleagues conducted a well done longitudinal cohort design study on the impact of low back pain treatments on future risk of lower extremity injury (JOSPT, 2025). Researchers reviewed the health records of over 450,000 patients (18-65 years old, average age 36, 35% female) to determine the correlation between their low back pain treatments and their future risk of injury.
Surprisingly, only 17% of all patients received at least 1 session of therapeutic exercise. On average this 17% received 3 therapeutic exercise sessions. Patients treated with therapeutic exercise had a significant reduction in hip, knee, and foot/ankle injuries in the future. As expected this injury risk was further reduced with additional exercise sessions. This emphasizes the importance of rehabilitating each back injury to prevent future recurrence of back symptoms.
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