Early Mobilization of Acute Whiplash Injuries
PainSci summary of Mealy 1986?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 at the bottom of the page, as often as possible.
From the abstract: “Results showed that eight weeks after the accident the degree of improvement seen in the actively treated [early mobilization] group compared with the group given standard treatment was significantly greater ....”
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.
Acute whiplash injuries are a common cause of soft tissue trauma for which the standard treatment is rest and initial immobilisation with a soft cervical collar. Because the efficacy of this treatment is unknown a randomised study in 61 patients was carried out comparing the standard treatment with an alternative regimen of early active mobilisation. Results showed that eight weeks after the accident the degree of improvement seen in the actively treated group compared with the group given standard treatment was significantly greater for both cervical movement (p less than 0.05) and intensity of pain (p less than 0.0125).
related content
These four articles on PainScience.com cite Mealy 1986 as a source:
- PS Does Massage Therapy Work? — A review of the science of massage therapy … such as it is
- PS Mobilize! — Dynamic joint mobility drills are an alternative to stretching that “massage with movement”
- PS Save Yourself from Neck Pain! — A complete guide to chronic neck pain and the disturbing sensation of a “crick”
- PS The Art of Rest — The finer points of resting strategy when recovering from injury and chronic pain (hint: it’s a bit trickier than you might think)
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:
- Effectiveness of customised foot orthoses for Achilles tendinopathy: a randomised controlled trial. Munteanu 2015 Br J Sports Med.
- A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
- The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.
- Agreement of self-reported items and clinically assessed nerve root involvement (or sciatica) in a primary care setting. Konstantinou 2012 Eur Spine J.
- Effect of NSAIDs on Recovery From Acute Skeletal Muscle Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Morelli 2017 Am J Sports Med.