[Back pain--from the viewpoint of medical technology. Danish National Board of Health].

The appearance of various consensus reports, guidelines, Cochrane Centers, and other evidence-based medicine initiatives during the past decade has resulted in marked improvement in the rational utilisation of available knowledge of attitudes toward the issue of low back pain (LBP). Moreover, owing to the ready access to updated data bases, this knowledge has been disseminated with incredible speed. In the spring of 1995, the Danish National Board of Health in Denmark convinced a multidisciplinary team of back specialists to tailor data available in the international reports for Danish needs. The article outlines the findings of this team, the major recommendations being that providing information is preferable to treatment, that patients should be encouraged to remain active, that physical exercise should be kept up except during the acute phases, that most episodes of LBP are to be considered life events rather than automatic reasons to seek treatment, and that passive treatment should be minimised, though manipulation may be helpful in the short term.