SOURCE: Palmer Website Archives
Chiropractic turns 119 today. At Palmer, it’s also referred to as Founder’s Day. Wish DD and all of us success for the next 119 years. We are on a roll!
Spinal Manipulation and Home Exercise With Advice for Subacute and Chronic Back-Related Leg Pain: A Trial With Adaptive Allocation
SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine 2014 (Sep 16); 161 (6): 381—391
Gert Bronfort, DC, PhD; Maria A. Hondras, DC, MPH;
Craig A. Schulz, DC, MS; Roni L. Evans, DC, PhD;
Cynthia R. Long, PhD; and Richard Grimm, MD, PhD
University of Minnesota,
Northwestern Health Sciences University,
and Berman Center for Outcomes and Clinical Research
at the Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, and
Palmer Center for Chiropractic Research,
Davenport, Iowa
| Chiropractic Treatment Helps Back-Related Leg Pain FROM: MedPage Today ~ September 16, 2014 By Shara Yurkiewicz , Staff Writer, MedPage Today
Patients with back-related leg pain who received spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) plus home exercise and advice (HEA) had less leg pain, lower back pain, and disability after 12 weeks than patients who received home exercise and advice alone, researchers reported. At 1 year, those differences were no longer significant, wrote Gert Bronfort, DC, PhD, at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minn., and colleagues in a study appearing in Annals of Internal Medicine. But patients experienced more global improvement, higher satisfaction, and lower medication use, the researchers reported. The findings suggest that SMT in addition to HEA could be a safe and effective conservative, short-term treatment approach for back-related leg pain, the authors said. “Prior to this study, SMT was considered a viable treatment option of what is known as ‘uncomplicated low back pain,’ which is low back pain without radiating pain to the leg,” authors Bronfort and Roni Evans, DC, PhD, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, wrote in an email to MedPage Today. “This study shows that for patients without progressive neurological deficits and serious identifiable causes (e.g., spinal fracture, etc.) SMT, coupled with home exercise and advice, may be helpful, and should be considered,” they added. |
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Source Canada.com
SHERYL UBELACKER, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Professor Stuart McGill demonstrates the motion of the spine during sex in a handout photo. Contrary to popular belief, spooning is not always the best sex position for those with a bad back, according to new research from the University of Waterloo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-University of Waterloo
For many people, intimacy in the bedroom often takes a back seat to low back pain, say researchers, who have scientifically determined the best sexual positions to prevent spinal muscles from seizing up at an inopportune moment.
In what they believe is the first biomechanical study of its kind, researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that certain positions are better than others for keeping different kinds of back pain at bay.
And they’ve thrown out the long-held belief that spooning — where partners lie sideways curled back to front — is the only pose for back-saving sex.
“Before now, spooning was often recommended by physicians as the one position that fit all. But as we’ve discovered, that is not the case,” said Natalie Sidorkewicz, a PhD candidate and lead author of the paper published Thursday in the journal Spine.
“What that failed to do was recognize that there are all sorts of triggers for back pain,” she said from Waterloo, Ont. “So someone may find relief in one position that may cause pain for someone else.”
To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 10 heterosexual couples, with an average age of about 30, to have sexual intercourse in a controlled laboratory setting.
Each participant was fitted with remote sensors, which tracked how their spines moved when they engaged in five common sex positions. Infrared and electromagnetic motion capture systems — such as those used to animate figures in video games and films — showed how the men’s and women’s spines flexed when they assumed each position.
“So we were able to actually determine what angle the spine is at, at each moment in time that they’re having sex,” said Sidorkewicz, adding that electrodes on participants’ skin also captured activity in their core and hip muscles.
The findings were used to create an atlas, or set of guidelines, that recommends different sex positions and thrusting techniques based on what movements trigger a patient’s pain.
(more…)
Source Neatorama and Google Life Archives
In the 50s and 60s, American chiropractors held a series of rather unusual beauty pageants where contestants were judged and winners picked not only by their apparent beauty and poise, but also their standing posture (backed with X-rays of their spines, of course).
The contests were a publicity stunt, Reginal Hug, past president of the Association for the History of Chiropractic, told Scott Hensley of NPR, and was meant to burnish the reputation of the profession. The message, he said, was that good posture led to good health and that chiropractors could help with that. “In those days, nobody was concerned about radiation,” Hug added, noting the use of X-rays to check for spinal structures.
Why not contests for men? Actually, there were some but they weren’t as popular and didn’t last very long. “The guys always slouched,” Hug added.
Like many things that were hot back in the early 20th century (like flagpole sitting, goldfish swallowing and phone booth stuffing), the popularity of the chiropractic beauty pageant waned. The last big contest was held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1969.
SOURCE: J Can Chiropr Assoc 2014 (Sept); 58(3): 220–237
Lyndon G. Amorin-Woods, B.App.Sci (Chiropractic)
Randy W. Beck, BSc (Hons), DC, PhD, DACNB, FAAFN, FACFN, Gregory F. Parkin-Smith, MTech(Chiro), MBBS, MSc, DrHC, James Lougheed, BA (Hons), Alexandra P. Bremner, BSc (Hons), DipEd, GradDipAppStats, PhD
Senior Clinical Supervisor, School of Health Professions
Murdoch University
Enrolled student, Master of Public Health
School of Population Health Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences
The University of Western Australia
Aim: To determine adherence to clinical practice guidelines in the medical, physiotherapy and chiropractic professions for acute and subacute mechanical low back pain through best-evidence synthesis of the healthcare literature.
Methods: A structured best-evidence synthesis of the relevant literature through a literature search of relevant databases for peer-reviewed papers on adherence to clinical practice guidelines from 1995 to 2013. Inclusion of papers was based on selection criteria and appraisal by two reviewers who independently applied a modified Downs & Black appraisal tool. The appraised papers were summarized in tabular form and analysed by the authors.
Results: The literature search retrieved 23 potentially relevant papers that were evaluated for methodological quality, of which 11 studies met the inclusion criteria. The main finding was that no profession in the study consistently attained an overall high concordance rating. Of the three professions examined, 73% of chiropractors adhered to current clinical practice guidelines, followed by physiotherapists (62%) and then medical practitioners (52%).
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Source University of Exeter
Vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in older people, according to the most robust study of its kind ever conducted.
An international team, led by Dr David Llewellyn at the University of Exeter Medical School, found that study participants who were severely Vitamin D deficient were more than twice as likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
The team studied elderly Americans who took part in the Cardiovascular Health Study. They discovered that adults in the study who were moderately deficient in vitamin D had a 53 per cent increased risk of developing dementia of any kind, and the risk increased to 125 per cent in those who were severely deficient.
Similar results were recorded for Alzheimer’s disease, with the moderately deficient group 69 per cent more likely to develop this type of dementia, jumping to a 122 per cent increased risk for those severely deficient.
The study was part-funded by the Alzheimer’s Association, and is published in August 6 2014 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. It looked at 1,658 adults aged 65 and over, who were able to walk unaided and were free from dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke at the start of the study. The participants were then followed for six years to investigate who went on to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
Dr Llewellyn said: “We expected to find an association between low Vitamin D levels and the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but the results were surprising – we actually found that the association was twice as strong as we anticipated.