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Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Questionnaire

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Pain is something that needs to be taken into account when treating a person for the first time and every time after that. Although everyone has different pain interpretations, it is important to know exactly how the patients being treated feel. Are they getting better? Are they getting worse? Does this minimize the patient’s pain? Due to everyone having a different way to interpret pain there are many different pain and disability questionnaires that better help Physical Therapists and Physical Therapist Assistants in understanding exactly what is wrong. One of these different scales used to better understand a patient’s pain is called the Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Questionnaire. This questionnaire is specific to low back or leg pain and it goes into detail in ten different sections as to how the patient feels during activities such as walking, lifting, or traveling. It is a tool used so that PTs and PTAs can better understand exactly what needs to be worked on and what can be done to alleviate the pain.

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The Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Questionnaire is different in many cases because it is not a pain scale that solely looks at how much pain a patient is in. This scale takes into account the disability portion which is how this is debilitating a patient’s daily life and the activities they need to get done. Tibbles et al. (2021) states, “Clinicians may often underestimate the impact of illness by missing its influence on a patient’s daily activities”.It is important to have different pain scales out in the world, but it is also important that these pain scales and questionnaires are reliable and valid. In order to ensure this reliability and validity a research team must perform a series of tests and collect the data necessary to make this a “reliable and valid” questionnaire for physicians and anyone necessary to use.

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A research study was done to test the Oswestry where different forms of the questionnaire were created to test its validity and reliability amongst different people. In order to ensure that this questionnaire was valid and reliable the research team needed to make sure that there were combinations of different people in the sample. The sample for the research included people of all ages beginning at 17 and older. The levels of low back pain were from acute to chronic, people from all different workplaces, and a mix of genders. They also provided eight different versions of the ODQ switching the order in sections and the order in which the responses show up. Tibbles et al. (2021) stated that it was noted that people may have answered inappropriately and because they had chosen that they had a moderate pain level in section one that meant that they needed to be moderate as well in all the other sections, which is the result of an inaccurate disability rating. Due to the inaccurate disability ratings the research team found that the severely dependent people were underrepresented. The study did not include anyone in the same size that was extremely dependent due to their disability.

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In the study done by Tibbbles et al. (2021) they noted that there was no significance to the eight different versions of the questionnaire that were made. All eight versions were answered in a way that did not alter any results or bring up any new findings. The thing that the researchers focused on a lot were response dependent answers, meaning that many people were answering according to the amount they put in their previous answers and not only looking at the single section. In the study done by Tibbles et al. (2021) although it does not make a huge difference, it was noted that in order to make sure the answers are consistent the patient can answer the questionnaire more than once on different days. It was also shown in the study done by Tibbles et al. (2021) that patients can also accommodate to their pain means if a patient has a pain that they have been dealing with for 10 plus years that pain may no longer feel deliberating. This allows for the patients that actually have chronic pain to score a lower disability rating only because they are acustim to the pain they have had most of their lives.

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According to the study done by Tibbles et al. (2021), the research showed that this questionnaire had good internal consistency with no response set bias and strongly correlated with RM scores. This is not the only research that has been done to make sure that the ODQ is a good valid scale. According to Aiyegbusi el al. (2017), this tool was performed for both interrater reliability and intrarater reliability. Aiyegbusi et al. (2017) stated, “ODI is a reliable and valid tool for assessing functional disability in low back pain patients”. Although the study that was done by Aiyegbusi et al (2017) was done for a country with a different language and everything had to be translated the ODQ still performed in a reliable way for their non-english speaking patients. Being able to see that the questionnaire performs well even in different parts of the world is a remarkable thing to see and emphasizes even more its importance towards physicians, PTs, PTAs, and the patients that need it.

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The ODQ is a questionnaire that takes a patient’s pain scale and has the ability to pinpoint in what areas of daily activity this is affecting the most. The ten different sections allow for healthcare professionals to understand exactly what could be going on if you have no pain sitting or standing and then the pain becomes present when a patient lifts. It is extremely important that in the healthcare profession all of the pain scales and questionnaires used are ones that are reliable and valid so that the PTs and PTAs can get the most accurate results as possible every time they see their patient. In both the study done by Tibbles et al. (2021) and Aiyegbusi et al. (2017), the ODQ proved to be a reliable and valid test despite the sample sizes, the different order of sections, and the language barriers. The ODQ is a reliable questionnaire that is great at helping PTs and PTAs help their patients and better understand the already complex human body. This is just one more tool that can better help the PTs or PTAs, show their patients how to get better and create a lifestyle where their patients can perform their daily life activities free of low back pain.