Physiotherapists’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Intolerance of Uncertainty Influence Decision Making in Low Back Pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Low back pain (LBP) remains a common health problem that is characterized by ambiguity and can progress to chronic disability. In recent years researchers have started to focus on understanding whether and how the attitudes and beliefs of the health care providers influence the management and the outcome of LBP. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to characterize Quebec physiotherapists' (PTs') knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about LBP and their intolerance of uncertainty (IU) to determine whether and how these characteristics predict judgments of assessment and treatment recommendations. METHODS: A total of 108 PTs from Quebec, Canada completed the Pain Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for Physiotherapists, the Fear of Pain Questionnaire, and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Participants also read 2 vignettes that described patients with LBP and reported their assessment and treatment recommendations. RESULTS: Only 13 PTs (12%) were able to identify clinical practice guidelines for LBP. In addition, PTs did not generally agree with recommendations to return to work or activity. A biomedical orientation was a significant predictor of clinical judgments of spinal pathology and was associated with an increased sense of IU. In contrast, a behavioral approach better predicted treatment recommendations for return-to-work or activity. Finally, the association between IU and treatment decisions was mediated by treatment orientation. DISCUSSION: Health care practitioners play a significant role in the management of LBP. Research on the process of knowledge translation, clinical decision making, and dealing with uncertainty to avoid aggravating LBP disability is clearly warranted.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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".