Research over the last years have reported an increased popularity of complementary therapies (CTs) and an integration of CTs into mainstream medical settings, health care organizations and insurance plans. These trends may present both new challenges and new opportunities for health care provision. In Sweden and elsewhere, major challenges include the great variety and quality of CT provision within health care and a lack of national and international recommendations of how integrations of CTs with conventional care should be modelled, i.e. lack of conceptual models for delivering integrative medicine (IM). This may partly be a result of a scarce evidence base in support of IM provision within public health care services, e.g. lack of IM compared to usual care in randomised clinical trials. It remains largely unknown whether comprehensive models of IM are clinically or cost effectively different from conventional care provision.

Back and neck pain are costly, conventionally managed in primary care and two of the most common conditions treated by CTs. We have developed a comprehensive collaborative consensus model for IM adapted to Swedish primary care. The aim of this pilot study is to explore if the developed IM model will help patients with back/neck pain better than usual primary care management, i.e. to test the hypothesis that IM would be more effective than treatment as usual.