The effects of a media campaign on beliefs and utilization of imaging examinations in Norwegian patients with low back pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aims: Several authors have reported an overuse of imaging examinations for unspecific low back pain conditions. In this study, we examined the influence of a media campaign for better understanding and management of back pain in the general population on utilization of imaging examinations. Methods: The media campaign Active Back ran for three years (2002-2005) in two Norwegian counties and the results were compared to the adjacent control county. Numbers of imaging examinations were collected manually from every radiology department in each of the three counties, while belief measures were collected through a telephone survey before, during and after the campaign. Beliefs of the health care providers were collected through questionnaires. Results: We observed a decrease of X-rays by 35% in the intervention counties and by 33% in the control county. The number of CT scans decreased by 51% and 57% respectively. The number of MRI scans increased by 152% in the intervention counties and by 596% in the control. Combining all modalities, the number of imaging examinations increased by 3% in the intervention counties and by 56% in the control county. There was a tendency both in the general public and among the health care providers towards less trust in the usefulness of X-rays in all counties during the study period. The health care providers in the control county seemed to recommend imaging more often than their colleagues in the intervention counties. Conclusion: Despite slightly increased scepticism among the general public and health care providers, we observed an overall increase in utilization of imaging modalities. The dramatically increased utilization in the control group was likely explained by an increased capacity for MRI examinations obtained by the opening of a new radiology clinic, and not as an effect of the media campaign.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".