Farmers face greater challenges in obtaining treatment for back pain, study finds

Thursday, February 20, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

Farmers with chronic back pain have less access to health service providers in their rural communities than urban people have in cities, according to a University of Saskatchewan researcher.

That was one of the findings of a study looking at how farmers with back pain are different than other Canadians with back pain. It was done by Catherine Trask, assistant professor in the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture. She is also the Canada Research Chair in Ergonomics and Musculoskeletal Health.

The health care providers to which farmers have less access include doctors, nurses, physical therapists and chiropractors.

Trask says farmers in the study are more likely to be male and the average farmer is older than the average worker in other industries. “We found that 11 per cent of the farmers in our group were over 65 (years old) but only 3.5 per cent of the non-farmers were over 65.”

Farming is an occupation “where we have more people staying working for longer and fewer younger people coming in,” she notes.

Trask says she knows from previous research that farmers “do report more back injury than the general population.”

Farmers’ jobs have many of the risk factors that contribute to chronic back pain, including heavy lifting, whole body vibration, awkward postures and very long working hours. “We know that these are the kinds of working exposures that farmers tend to have a lot of,” she notes.

Her work was a population-based study of Canadians who have chronic back pain. “We split the group in two and we were looking at those folks who were farmers and those that had any other occupation” with the goal of comparing farmers to everyone else, she says.

Trask did her study by analyzing the data from a telephone survey done by Statistics Canada in its Canadian Community Health Survey of 2009 and 2010. There were 11, 251 non-farmers and 350 farmers, all from across Canada, in the survey. The groups were uneven in size because there are so many occupations “but only a small proportion of people list farming as an occupation,” she says.

It took her most of last year to do the data analysis. The findings were published in the Journal of Rural Health at the beginning of this year. BF