Low back pain and point of views in Iranian traditional medicine

Backache is among the most common causes of patients’ visits to health professionals. In conventional medicine, treatments for backache mostly comprise maintenance/supportive therapy and despite the advancements in imaging techniques, the variety of treatments and increased costs, better treatment outcome for this condition has yet to be observed. Therefore, evaluation of treatment approaches in other systems like in Iranian traditional medicine seems necessary in order to find new preventive or therapeutic measures for this condition. Treatment in traditional medicine is mostly based on elimination of the cause and symptomatic treatment is avoided as much as possible. Recognizing the causes of backache is the main part of its treatment course. The present study reviews signs and symptoms of this condition collected from various resources and references in traditional medicine. Back pain in traditional medicine is equal to dorsalgia or backache (Vaja-El-Zahr in Arabic) and is divided into two main groups of simple and materialistic type. Symptoms and method of diagnosis for each group is separately discussed