Webinar Overview

This is a pre-recorded Webinar and includes a CPD Certificate at completion.

Access to Course: 30 Days

Course includes:

  • Resources: Manual
  • Pre-record Webinar:  90 Minutes
  • CPD Certificate


Guidelines for management of back pain are based on RCTs that typically include patients older than 18 and younger than 65. Young and old are poorly represented. While most back pains do improve quickly, persistent pain is common, and recurrences are to be expected.

A small proportion have catastrophic but not life threatening disorders. A stratified approach to care provision makes sense for cost containment, but for those with catastrophic disabling conditions, time taken to acknowledge and treat their conditions can be long and filled with irrelevant advice on minimizing risk factors, increasing pain tolerance and improving coping skills.

The two big DON’Ts in back pain care are:

  • Catastrophizing the mundane: making too much of mild or brief periods of low back pain. Guidelines are good at managing this problem.
  • Trivializing the catastrophic: For those patients without Red Flag conditions or radicular syndrome, yet have severe and/or disabling pain, guideline management is often demoralizing, ineffective and demeaning. Pathologies that are real are often missed or undiscovered for years


This webinar will address both of these DONTs, focusing mostly on “Trivializing the Catastrophic” which guidelines tend to encourage. Brief presentations of recent cases seen by Mark Laslett are used to illustrate failures of routine guideline management. The webinar consists of a 90 minute presentation and includes the Q & A session.

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