The Clinical journal of pain
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Factors that influence the applicability of sham needle in acupuncture trials: two randomized, single-blind, crossover trials with acupuncture-experienced subjects.
In recent years the retractable type of sham needle has been anticipated to be a possible solution for masking patients in acupuncture research. However, this needle has been intended mainly for acupuncture-naïve subjects. The authors' goal in this study was to assess the validity of the retractable type of sham needle. ⋯ Potential factors that influence the applicability of "placebo" needling include not only inter-tester variability but also the patient's knowledge and experience of acupuncture, acupuncture point selection, the visual impact of needling, and so on.
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Comparative Study
The attitudes to back pain scale in musculoskeletal practitioners (ABS-mp): the development and testing of a new questionnaire.
Little is known about practitioners' beliefs and attitudes to the treatment of low back pain, and whether these influence their clinical decisions, intervention strategies, and patient-centered outcomes. This study aimed to develop, test, and explore the underlying dimensions of a new questionnaire, the Attitudes to Back Pain Scale (ABS), in a specific group of clinicians, practitioners who specialize in musculoskeletal therapy. ⋯ The internal structure of the new questionnaire not only shows excellent psychometric properties and good face validity, but also has the added advantage of being developed with a specific clinical context in mind. Additional evaluation is required to fully describe the psychometric integrity of this instrument.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Manual therapy, physical therapy, or continued care by the general practitioner for patients with neck pain: long-term results from a pragmatic randomized clinical trial.
The authors' goals were to compare the effectiveness of manual therapy (MT; mainly spinal mobilization), physical therapy (PT; mainly exercise therapy), and continued care by the general practitioner (GP; analgesics, counseling and education) over a period of 1 year. ⋯ Short-term results (at 7 weeks) have shown that MT speeded recovery compared with GP care and, to a lesser extent, also compared with PT. In the long-term, GP treatment and PT caught up with MT, and differences between the three treatment groups decreased and lost statistical significance at the 13-week and 52-week follow-up.
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The authors examined whether self-reported menopausal status is associated with musculoskeletal pain in a multiethnic population of community-dwelling middle-aged women after considering sociodemographics, medical factors, smoking, depression, and body mass index using a cross-sectional study design. ⋯ This study demonstrates an association between pain and self-reported menopausal status, with postmenopausal women experiencing greater pain symptoms than premenopausal women.
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This study was aimed at identifying mothers' responses to children's pain, evaluating whether these could be organized into different types of responses, and developing a questionnaire to assess these responses. ⋯ Results suggest that mothers' responses to children's pain behavior may be classified into 3 distinct categories. Additional research is needed to assess whether observational methodologies would yield a similar typology of parents' responses to children's pain. Psychometric properties of the Adult Responses to Children's Symptoms should be examined in larger samples and in studies of the relation of the subscales to related constructs (eg, measures of parenting beliefs and behavior) and to children's pain behavior.