Research Evidence
Is Lifting Technique Important?
A common theme I continue to encounter in clinical practice is the belief from patients, and health care providers, that correct lifting technique i.e. maintaining a lumbar lordosis, is critical in the prevention and rehabilitation of back injuries. I can recall this belief being around for as long as I have been practicing and studying […]
The Core Stability Problem
When I refer to “Core Stability” I mean teaching patients isolated contractions of transverses abdominus and multifidus. This is then usually progressed (depending on the practitioner) to having the patient contracting these muscle in functional movement patterns. The end aim being reduction of pain and improvement in function. From my perspective the “core stability” direction started following […]
In Pursuit of Pathology
I have recently attended a couple of seminars that have mentioned how newer and better MRI units will begin to be used in the attempt to identify pathology in patients with musculoskeletal pain. Now this sounds a fantastic and a worthwhile cause, especially if it enables us to identify symptomatic pathology in a patient population […]
Fear and Fear Avoidance – Research Update -May 2014
I though it about time to provide an update regarding some recent articles/publications relating to the topic of Fear and Fear Avoidance. As seen in an earlier post, Fear is an important psychosocial factor that we need to be aware of when assessing and treating patients. The new research continues to provide support for this. Wertli […]
Cold Hyperalgesia Testing
I have often read in the literature the view that Cold Hyperalgesia is suggestive of more “severe” pain states and hence poorer prognosis. For example: Van Oosterwijck et al (2013) reported in their Systematic literature review on the evidence for central sensitisation in chronic whiplash that: The outcome of the processes involved in central sensitization […]
Sleep and Chronic Pain – Research Update – March 2014
The association between poor sleep and chronic pain is an interesting subject. For those interested, I previously posted on Sleep and Chronic Pain back in September 2012. I had the following fantastic article forwarded to me by a colleague, and I thought it apt to provide a research update on this topic. Finan PH, Goodin BR, Smith MT. The association […]
Treatment of Tendinopathy – Research Update – February 2014
I thought it might be time to begin revisiting some of the key topics I have covered thus far. The first topic to update being Treatment of Tendinopathy. For those interested, my last post in this topic can be found here. One of the great recent articles I reviewed was by Rio et al (2014). […]
Treatment of Chronic Pain?
Hopefully anyone seeing the title of this post will not be clicking on it thinking that I have the answers to chronic pain……please note the maze in the cover image and the question mark at the end of the title! Lets be honest, the outcomes that chronic pain patients are achieving, via all forms of […]
MRI Findings in Low Back Pain
Hopefully we are all familiar with the current view that most lower back pain is “non-specific” in nature. What this means is that there is no obvious finding on imaging (MRI etc) that can explain a cause of the patients pain. But what is some of evidence base in relation to MRI findings in low […]
Clinical Diagnosis of Meniscal Tears in the Knee – Research Evidence
Hi all. This post continues on with the theme relating to the “usefulness” of clinical tests. The time the topic of this post is “Clinical Diagnosis of Meniscal Tears in the Knee – Research Evidence”. Once again this post throws values around for sensitivity, specificity, LR’s etc. So here is some information from a previous […]
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