Views on radiography use for patients with acute low back pain among chiropractors in an Ontario community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies suggest that chiropractors continue to widely use radiography for assessing patients with acute low back pain. This practice is contrary to growing evidence that suggests only a small percentage of patients with acute low back pain require radiographic evaluation. OBJECTIVES: To assess quantitatively and qualitatively the views of chiropractors in a selected community in Ontario on the use of radiography for evaluating patients with acute low back pain. STUDY DESIGN: Mailed surveys and focus group interview. METHOD: Surveys were mailed to all chiropractors (N = 26) in a selected community in Ontario, followed by a focus group session with local chiropractors (n = 7). Surveys requested information on personal and practice characteristics and the management of low back pain, including the use of radiography. The focus group, led by a facilitator, discussed issues surrounding practice guidelines and radiography use. RESULTS: There was a 76% response rate to the mailed surveys. Of those who responded, 63% stated they would use radiography on patients with uncomplicated acute low back pain lasting 1 week; 68% stated that radiographs were useful in the diagnostic evaluation of patients with acute low back pain lasting less than 1 month. Most reasons given for use of radiography in this patient population are not supported by existing evidence. CONCLUSIONS: There appears to be a high rate of radiographic use by chiropractors in the study community, which is consistent with findings in previous studies. Many of the reasons given for use of radiography are not supported by existing evidence and may contribute to the gap between current chiropractic practice and available evidence with respect to use of radiography for acute low back pain.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".