Three immediately applicable treatments: manual therapy, avoiding cortisone, and automatic external defibrillators.

摘要

Are you interested in neck and back pain or injury prevention? Have you injected cortisone? Do you think you might eventually die? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions this Warm up is for you. Recent world conferences for a broad range of clinicians provided many highlights.For those who needed more proof of the effectiveness of manual therapy, and sadly there are some physicians who do, I share a key finding from the 9th International Congress of the International Federation of Orthopaedic Manual Therapists (IFOM.T). A systematic review of manual therapy in neck or back pain concluded that the treatment was effective with a "number needed to treat" of only five. Thus, manual therapy was about 100 times as effective when used to combat neck or back pain as osteoporosis drugs are to prevent hip fractures. If five patients are treated with manual therapy one of them will make a clinically significant improvement ("number needed to treat" = 5). Physicians need to prescribe the most effective osteoporosis drugs to over 500 65-year-old patients to prevent one hip fracture per year. If you prefer a cardiovascular example then you will know that to prevent one cardiac death 715 at-risk patients must be treated with Hpid-low-ering agents for a year.2 These medical examples are important to place a "1 in 5" success rate for manual therapy in perspective. It is terrific!