Although the back school is a popular treatment for patients with low back pain, especially in Scandinavian countries, very few well-designed studies into the effectiveness of this type of treatment have been performed. Back schools are programs in a group setting, directed toward pain management and consisting of elements of education and/or training of skills. The Maastricht Back School is designed to be a combination of all those elements about which we consider a back school should give information and training. In order to determine the effectiveness of the Maastricht Back School, we conducted a randomized trial (n = 77) comparing a group that attended back school with a waiting list control group. The most important measures of effect were pain management, pain, medical consumption, and absenteeism from work. The overall response was 85.5%. The results of an intention-to-treat analysis of the data collected 2 and 6 months after randomization consistently suggested inefficacy of the Maastricht Back School for all effect parameters (except for the effect parameter knowledge). Though the present study certainly had some limitations, we question the clinical relevancy of back schools.
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