Letter to the Editor concerning 'Development of a clinical prediction rule to identify patients with neck pain likely to benefit from cervical traction and exercise' by Raney N et al. (2009) Eur Spine J 18:382-391.

摘要

With interest we read the article by Raney et al. [1] in which they developed a prediction rule to identify patients with neck pain who are likely to improve with cervical traction. We agree with the authors that external validation is needed before the rule can be implemented in routine clinical practice. However, we doubt that this rule will be valid in an external population, because some analytical choices made by the authors probably hamper external validity.