Life is as much a pain as it ever was

EDITOR—The article by Palmer et al shows that the reporting of back pain in the United Kingdom has increased during the past decade.1 This is potentially important because, despite rises in indirect measures such as sickness and invalidity benefit payments for back pain in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, there has been little evidence that back pain is actually becoming more common.2 Area defined as low back in studies 3 4 We conducted two …