How much of treatment effect is needed to actually matter?
Two articles on PainSci cite Williams 2011: 1. The Chiropractic Controversies 2. Statistical Significance Abuse
PainSci notes on Williams 2011:
There are various ways of measuring improvement in scientific tests of treatments. As this paper points out, “when an outcome measure improves by, say, five points it is not immediately apparent what this means.” How much improvement matters? It is extremely common for experimenters to confirm real, statistically significant treatment effects that are nevertheless trivial. This paper discusses how much benefit is needed to be taken seriously, and cites the damning example of spinal manipulation. Chiropractors routinely claim that the benefits of spinal adjustment are “proven,” but the authors point out that trials have “shown an effect size for manipulation that is less than the threshold for what is clinically worthwhile.”
I think it’s particularly noteworthy that these authors have no particular axe to grind about chiropractic treatment — this is not a paper about that. They simply needed a good example to make their point, and it’s telling that they picked spinal manipulative therapy.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Patient-based outcome measures have been developed to measure the health status of patients suffering from many conditions found in musculoskeletal medicine. Many types have been developed. Generic measures can be used across a broad spectrum of illness and can compare the health of an affected group with that in the general population.1 Condition-specific instruments on the other hand measure the effect of a single condition on health. Compared to generic measures they have a narrower focus and are more sensitive to small but clinically significant changes in health status over short periods. Examples include the Roland–Morris questionnaire2 for low back pain and Western Ontario McMaster universities arthritis index (WOMAC) for osteoarthritis.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.
- Inciting events associated with lumbar disc herniation. Suri 2010 Spine J.
- Prediction of an extruded fragment in lumbar disc patients from clinical presentations. Pople 1994 Spine (Phila Pa 1976).
- Characteristics of patients with low back and leg pain seeking treatment in primary care: baseline results from the ATLAS cohort study. Konstantinou 2015 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision in reducing risk of mental health problems and promoting well-being in adolescence: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial. Kuyken 2022 Evid Based Ment Health.