[A new method of functional rehabilitation of patients with occupational disability caused by lumbar spine pathology].

Rehabilitation is reducing disability through an improvement of function, i.e. rehabilitation need always to be "functional". Nevertheless, like it happened in other fields where rehabilitation has not yet reached its maturity, in spinal pathologies it has usually been considered equal to conservative treatment, i.e. not surgical relief of pain. But relieving pain does not always mean to recover function: in fact, it has been proven that there are no long term good results treating symptomatically chronic low back pain (CLBP). In the Eighties in USA a new kind of treatment has been introduced for inpatient rehabilitation of CLBP, based on a full-time four-weeks training of physical abilities, together with a cognitive and educational approach to pain. This treatment, named "functional rehabilitation", proved its efficacy also in randomised controlled trials (RCT). In the Nineties in Finland the outpatient version of this treatment for CLBP has been developed by "Documentation Based Care" (DBC), whose efficacy have also been documented in RCT: the efficiency of this last kind of treatment should be higher. DBC treatment is spreading around the world, and it recently reached Italy in Don Gnocchi.