The gap between back pain patients' prior knowledge and scientific knowledge and its evolution after a back school teaching programme: a quantitative evaluation.

This study presents a method for quantitative evaluation of the congruence between patients' representations and teachers' scientific knowledge, which is used as the standard of assessment. First, the patients' knowledge and the teachers' scientific concepts before a back school (BS) programme were compared (T0). Then the evolution of patients' knowledge at 1 month (T1) and 1 year (T2) after the teaching was evaluated. Patients' knowledge was assessed blind by a multidisciplinary panel of nine independent judges. Mean scores were computed for each set of data (T0,T1,T2); these scores were then submitted to an analysis of variance. The results showed an important gap between patients and teachers before BS with an improvement after the teaching. Knowledge referring to know-how and/or attitudes evolved differently when compared to theoretical knowledge.