A recent ‘award-winning’ paper ‘Evidence-Based Guidelines for the Chiropractic Treatment of Adults with Neck Pain’ by Bryans R et al, adds to the growing body of evidence that a multi-modal approach to non-specific mechanical neck pain is often most beneficial for the patient.
Bryans et al performed a systematic review of controlled clinical trials relating to non-specific neck pain with treatment through a range of different avenues including manipulation, mobilisation, exercise prescription, soft tissue therapy or transcutaneous nerve stimulation.
They used very strict inclusion criteria to remove all chances of bias and gave each trial a rating (strong, moderate, weak or conflicting) to formulate treatment recommendations. As a result from 41 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) 11 of these were used to formulate treatment recommendations.
The results indicated that there are strong recommendations for the treatment of chronic neck pain with a combination of manipulation, manual therapy, exercise prescription and other modalities.
Conversely there were weak recommendations for the treatment of chronic neck pain with manipulation alone and acute neck pain with exercises alone.
There are certain limitations to this research which need to be acknowledged. The authors have recognised that at the time of publication there may have been some new research presented that wasn’t able to be included into the systematic review. Also there are inherent limitations when developing guidelines as the nature of guidelines do not always reflect a clinical setting.
Overall this article further deepens the growing body of evidence surrounding a multi-modal approach to the treatment of non-specific neck pain. It is these systematic reviews which allow further studies to occur and allow important guidelines to develop in regards to effective treatment of conditions like non-specific neck pain and others.
If you would like more information or a copy of the full article please talk to our friendly staff.
Evidence-Based Guidelines for the Chiropractic Treatment of Adults with Neck Pain. Bryans R, Decina D et al (2014) Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics 43 Volume 37, Number 1. Abstract