Low-back and neck pain diagnosis and treatment.

Back and neck pain are symptoms, often complaints, and sometimes causes of disability, but they are not diseases. These distinctions are critical to understanding the personal and societal impact of back and neck pain and our opportunities to discover new ways to reduce their impact. This article briefly describes current diagnosis and treatment of spinal pain, the relationship between pain and disability, and the challenges in prioritizing our resource allocations between curing pain problems and reducing disability.