The Study of surgery referral accordance of patients affected by sciatica pain with standard therapeutic criteria

Introduction: Low back pain is the second reason for seeking medical advice and is the first one as a cause of disability in people with an age under 45 years. According to the follow-up researches on disk herniation surgery, inappropriate selection of surgery candidates may cause failure in the operation.Materials and Methods: It was a descriptive cross- sectional study conducted in surgery wards of Alzahra, Amin and Kashani hospitals (Isfahan, Iran) on 46 patients (mean age: 40 years(. All patients signed a formal consent. After completing the questioner about personal information and pain characteristics, the examiner determined the pain and sciatica intensity by means of VAS and SLR. These data, in addition to those obtained through the MRI reports, were analyzed by SPSS software (ver.13)Results: According to surgery criteria, 13 % of cases had no any radicular pain. In 85% of clients, lesser than 6 months had been passed from the beginning of radicular pain. Corsets were the most effective conservative treatment in 29 % of patients. Medication )18%), rest (17%) and physiotherapy (10%) were of the next standings.Conclusion: Most of patients in the study experienced surgery unnecessarily and they had not received sufficient conservative treatments despite the prolonged low back pain. The efficacy of conservative treatments is poor and it is especially the case for physiotherapy, although the importance of PT has been emphasized in the literature.