About Web of the Back

Use of this web site

This web site maybe visited, free of charge, as many times as you like.

This web site, including all its content, is protected by the international laws and agreements applicable to intellectual property. Any change, disposition, or act of public exploitation with reference to the page and its content are strictly forbidden without the previous and explicit consent of the Kovacs Foundation.

The Kovacs Foundation authorizes you to print, distribute, or disseminate the contents of this web site if you do so free of charge, for health education purposes, and always citing its origin, the address of this web site, and the fact that the intellectual property rights of the page and its content belong to the Kovacs Foundation.

Definition

Back pain may indicate the presence of an underlying medical condition or may be due to back conditions. This web site will only deal with the latter, generally known as "common back pain". Common back pain normally varies according to posture and tends to worsen with exertion. Common back pain is, by far, the most frequent cause of back pain, including diagnoses of arthritis, disc-herniation, disc protrusion, muscle contraction, scoliosis, spondylolisthesis, spinal stenosis, common back pain of unknown origin, etc.

Information on other illnesses such as tumors, infections, osteoporosis, or digestive problems, has not been included although these may also cause back pain.

Professional Site

You will find scientific information on common back pain and its clinical management, which has been carefully chosen by its methodological reliability. You may consult this Web site as often as you wish, free of charge.

Our goal is to spare you the burden of searching through the burgeoning medical literature and the uncertainty created by inconsistencies in scientific quality. Our task consists in locating all studies on back pain evaluating published throughout the world, assess them and summarise those that are reliable because of their scientific quality. Studies are afterward classified by keywords so that you may find the most updated, relevant and accurate information on specific topics of your interest at any moment.

To whom it is directed

Although access is free, this Web site has been especially designed for physicians and health professionals. If you are not interested in scientific and technical information, you may move on to the general public part of this Web

Topics

The content of this Web site only refers to common back pain, defined as:

Vertebral or paravertebral, cervical, thoracic and/or lumbosacral pain, in presence or not of referred or radiating pain, elicited by postures, movements or strain, and which is not due to fractures, spondylitis, traumatisms or neoplastic, neurological, infectious, vascular, endocrine, metabolic, gynecological or psychosomatic causes.

It includes studies on patients operated on for back pain, but it does not contain, for example, information on back pain due to tumors or osteoporosis

This Web site is focused on relevant information for health care providers. You will therefore find information on epidemiology, etiology and risk factors, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, socioeconomical evaluation, systematic reviews, meta-analysis, decision analysis, clinical practice guidelines and ethical aspects.

We do not undertake systematic review of basic research articles, although we may include some of them if outcomes are especially relevant for clinical practice, according to the Editorial Committee.

This Web site only includes studies performed with a method of research. Publications not based on actual research or those not possible to evaluate methodologically, such as editorials, letters, case reports or non-systematic literature reviews, are not considered.

Years Reviewed

Only studies published from 1990 onwards have been retrieved, reviewed and selected for publication in this Web site. It does not contain articles that have not been published, nor those published before this date.

Languages

This Web site only includes articles originally published in English, Spanish, French and German. This limitation is exclusively due to the language capabilities of the experts involved in article evaluation, and does not in any way reflect a prejudice against the scientific quality of studies published in other languages. Thus, articles in other languages can be evaluated if, in the future, experts fluent in these languages join our project.

At present, for scientific articles originally published in other than the considered languages, authors are invited to submit versions in any of the above mentioned languages to the Editorial Committee, along with the original publication. Translated versions will be evaluated with the same system as those articles published in English, Spanish, French and German.

Working method

Our working method and quality control procedures for each of the different processes are described thoroughly in this Web site. Conceptually, they consist of:

1. Location of clinical trials concerning common back pain in the MEDLINE, EMBASE, Pascal, Health Star, Psychoinfo, and Bioethics ../databases.

2. Evaluation of the methodological quality of the studies.

3. Summarisation in English and Spanish those studies especially reliable, based on their scientific quality.

The Editorial Committee welcomes suggestions and criticisms from the scientific community concerning its working method. Please address any comments to the Editorial Committee.

Users may also request the reasons for discarding a specific evaluated article as a result of the evaluation process. The Editorial Committee does not intend to create controversy with the authors or the journals where articles were originally published. However, the Editorial Committe is open to criticism from the international scientific community on the working method. The Editorial Committee will wellcome your feedback.

Participants

In the acknowledgement section you may find the names of the of documentalists, screeners, reviewers, and Editorial Board members who participate in this Web site.

Correspondence

This Web site is not a forum for discussion or comments on case reports. The Editorial Committee can be contacted exclusively to:

1. Provide a study inadvertently not included, or one published in a language different to that of the considered articles along with its translated version.
2. Enquire about reasons for discarding an article.
3. Offer to participate in the content and search for excellence of this Web as a methodological reviewer or medical translator.
4. Send comments or suggestions about our Web site or our working methods.

The Editorial Committee will thank you for your remarks but may not necessarily answer all individual comments or proposals.

Any person, wishing to collaborate in our endeavour should contact our Editorial Committee. We especially invite professionals in evidence-based medicine and interested in back pain.

General Public Site

This is a scientific web site aimed at informing the general population; the content is based on scientific information which has been simplified for the non-technical public. If you are a specialist and are interested in receiving scientific information, you may request it from our professional site.

To decide on the best available treatment for a patient with back pain, it is necessary to perform a thorough physical examination. Otherwise an incorrect diagnosis could be easily made and inappropriate treatments prescribed. This web site does not accept consultations on clinical cases.

The application of the recommendations of this web site to a specific patient requires the knowledge and experience of a physician. Since recommendations cited here might not be strictly applicable to individual cases, any doubts regarding this information should be discussed with a physician.

This is a scientific web site. The statements and recommmendations made come from sources which are considered reliable by the scientific community, but there controversy may exist over some specific aspects. This web site is constantly updated, so that its content can be modified over time because of new research.

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve this web site, as well as other issues that you would like to us to include. Please address your comments to the Editorial Committee.