Upon seeing the headline ‘Paracetamol does not help lower back pain’, I found myself emitting a small (well – actually quite a large) sigh. The image of queues of angry patients brandishing pitchforks and newspapers, demanding to know why I’ve been withholding ‘the good stuff’ and tricking them into taking pointless pills, came to my mind. I worry about health articles in the general press, particularly the transformation of clinical trials and evidence into headlines and soundbites; that the reader won’t necessarily read the whole article, or account for the limitations of the evidence, just taking home a simple one-liner: in this case, that paracetamol – arguably the most widely used painkiller in the country – is useless.
In this story, the study seems strong. A trial in Australia, published in the Lancet, concluded that paracetamol did not improve pain intensity, sleep quality or recovery time versus placebo among 1652 people with acute back pain.
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