OBJECTIVE: There are many therapeutic methods for chronic low back pain, and the assessment on the effectiveness and safety is very important. DATA SOURCES: An online search of Medline and Ovid database was undertaken to identify relevant articles published in English from January 1990 to November 2004 by using the keywords of 'chronic low back pain, rehabilitation/therapy'. STUDY SELECTION: Randomized controlled trials with or without the condition of blindness were searched to select parallel controlled studies. The control group was placebo control, sham-treated control or control with different therapeutic methods; The treatment groups were treated with drug, physical agent, massage, acupuncture and exercise. DATA EXTRACTION: Together 26 original articles about chronic low back pain were collected, and 20 trials met the inclusion criteria, another observational trial of operative effect was involved specially; Among the 5 deleted trials, 2 were repetitive studies and the other 3 were Meta analysis. DATA SYNTHESIS: Totally 3 358 patients were involved in the 21 trials, 4 trials of them were drug therapy, 1 was physiotherapy, 2 were massage therapy, 3 were acupuncture therapy, 3 were exercise therapy, 4 were combined therapy and 4 were surgical therapy. CONCLUSION: Massage therapy, laser therapy and exercise therapy are effective and safe for chronic low back pain. For nonspecific chronic low back pain, multidisciplinary therapy is the most effective. Radiofrequency neurotomy and intradiscal electrothermal therapy have definite effects on zygapophysial joint pain and discogenic low back pain respectively without any apparent complication.

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