A Population-Based Survey of Back Pain Beliefs in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Study Design. Population-based survey. Objectives. To assess the back pain beliefs in 2 provinces in Canada to inform a population-based educational campaign. Summary of Background Data. Beliefs, attitudes, and recovery expectations appear to influence recovery from back pain, yet prevailing public opinions about the condition have been little studied. Methods. Telephone surveys were conducted with 2400 adults in 2 Canadian provinces. Surveys included the Back Beliefs Questionnaire, and additional questions concerning age, gender, recent and lifetime back pain, coping strategies for back pain, and awareness and persuasiveness of media information concerning back pain. Results. A high prevalence of back pain was reported, with a lifetime prevalence of 83.8%, and 1-week prevalence of 34.2%. Generally, a pessimistic view of back pain was held. Most agreed that back pain makes everything in life worse, will eventually stop one from working, and will become progressively worse with age. Mixed opinions were observed regarding the importance of rest and staying active. A significant minority (12.3%) reported taking time off from work for their last back pain episode. Those individuals taking time off from work held more negative back pain beliefs, including the belief that back pain should be rested until it gets better. Conclusions. Public back pain beliefs in the 2 Canadian provinces sampled are not in harmony with current scientific evidence for this highly prevalent condition. Given the mismatch between public beliefs and current evidence, strategies for reeducating the public are needed. We conducted telephone surveys in Canada to assess back pain beliefs. Most respondents agreed that back pain makes everything in life worse, will eventually stop one from working, and will become progressively worse with age. Public back pain beliefs in the 2 Canadian provinces sampled are not in harmony with current scientific evidence for this highly prevalent condition.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".