The effect of physical therapists use of low back pain related placebo or nocebo communication on anxiety and illness perception in healthy participants.

Rationale: Proper verbal communication turns out to be a prerequisite of a good therapeutic relationship and a way to influence placebo- and nocebo effects. The effects of communication on therapeutic outcomes is an extremely important but underexplored dimension of the patient-therapist relationship. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of a placebo- or nocebo content educational low back pain (LBP) video on the experienced anxiety and illness perception of healthy students.
Objective: The primary aim of this study is to determine the effect of physical therapists use of low back pain (LBP) related placebo or nocebo communication on anxiety about the symptoms, anxiety in general and illness perception in healthy students. Secondary aim is to describe the working alliance of the physical therapist assessed by the patient after watching an educational video on LBP.
Study design: Experimental web-based randomized controlled trial. Participants will be randomly allocated to a short placebo or nocebo communicationCross sectional 1 point assessment of Anxiety and Ilness beliefs.
Study population: 100 students of Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen (HAN) University of Applied Sciences and University Utrecht without musculoskeletal pain in the last three months.
Intervention: The positive intervention group will be shown an educational LBP video containing placebo enhancing verbal language whereas, the negative intervention group will be shown an educational LBP video containing nocebo stimulating verbal language.
Primary study parameters: The primary study parameters are differences in anxiety and illness perception between the positive intervention group and the negative intervention group. Anxiety and illness perception will be measured only once, directly after the intervention with the Dutch versions of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-DY) and Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-K), respectively.

Healthy students watching an educational session using nocebo communication on Low Back Pain will show higher levels of anxiety and dysfunctional illness perception compared to students watching a session with placebo communication..

1. cross sectional. Cross sectional means that there is only 1 assessment. In this case, only one online assessment directly following the online presentation of the short communication. As this one point in time two measuresments will be assessed (see above): STAI to measure Anxiety, and IBQ to measure Illness bBeliefs Questionnaire.

Short, filmes education session on LBP