Immediate effects from manual therapy: much ado about nothing?
Three articles on PainSci cite Cook 2011: 1. Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder 2. “Windows of Opportunity” in Rehab 3. What Works for Pain?
PainSci commentary on Cook 2011: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
This short but technical article makes a simple, important point: we’ve seen a lot of less-than-awesome research showing that essentially any treatment can probably provide statistically significant immediate benefits (because pain is readily modulated by novel sensory input), but “the limited effect size for many … raises concerns about their clinical significance” and “may not provide substantial value during long-term, progressive, clinical decision making.”
What we need to further flesh out is which set of interventions that lead to immediate effects that are designed to define a clinical outcome, actually lead to long-term clinical benefits. What we don’t need is a litany of further studies that assume clinical importance because immediate effects occurred directly after the administration of a manual therapy intervention; we've got that covered.
related content
- “Closing the window of opportunity …,” Adam Meakins, Thesports.physio.
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:
- 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.
- Is there a relationship between throbbing pain and arterial pulsations? Mirza 2012 J Neurosci.