Three Ways That Recruitment in Randomized Controlled Trials May Not Reflect Real Life
By: Chad Cook, Amy McDevitt, Derek Clewley, Bryan O’Halloran As we wind up a year of recruitment on the SS-MECH trial [1], we are compelled to reflect on our recruitment strategies and study participants. Our study has included four recruitment sites and we’ve enrolled over 110 participants, which is nearly 85% of our targeted sample. […]
Pros and Cons of Paying Peer Reviewers
By: Juliana Ancalmo, Chad E Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA, Ciara Roche Background: Critical appraisal is a hallmark of peer reviewed publishing. Critical appraisal provides analytical evaluations of whether the results of the study can be believed, and can be transferred appropriately into other environments, for use in policy, education, or clinical practice [1]. Historically, critical […]
Yes, Peer Review is Broken, but It’s Probably Worse than You Think
By: Chad E. Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA We have problems: There are countless publications, editorials, and blogs indicating we have a notable problem with the peer review system used in scientific publications [1-4]. Concerns have included its inconsistency, its slow process, and the biases associated with reviewers (especially reviewer two) who have an axe to […]
On Mastery
By: Seth Peterson, PT, DPT, OCS, FAAOMPT “I don’t know how they can sleep at night.” I was getting chewed out in a hallway in my first year of residency training. My mentor was speaking in general terms, but it was painfully clear that “they” meant me. I had just seen an 11-year-old girl with […]
An Exercise in Interpreting Clinical Results
By: Chad E Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA Randomized Controlled Trials In clinical research, treatment efficacy (the extent to which a specific intervention, such as a drug or therapy, produces a beneficial result under ideal conditions) and effectiveness (the degree to which an intervention achieves its intended outcomes in real-world settings) are studied using randomized controlled […]
Disentangling the Truth about Manual Therapy
By: Chad E Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA The “Facts” Please Perhaps you’ve heard the following “facts”? The Great Wall of China is visible from space. If you touch a baby bird that is in its nest, the mother will abandon it. If you flush a toilet in the Southern Hemisphere, water rotates in the opposite […]
Manual Therapy: Manipulation of the Brain?
By: Tara Winters PT, DPT When a person walks into the clinic with low back pain with primary nociplastic pain mechanisms, I’m armed and ready with a number of treatment ideas. This is thanks to the leaps and bounds made in the last 20 to 30 years in the world of pain science. “Let’s see […]
The Relevance of Contextual Factors for Hands-on Treatment in Musculoskeletal Pain and Manual Therapy
By: Giacomo Rossettini PT, PhD ‘I definitely feel less pain in my back after the manipulation’. ‘My shoulder has better mobility after the massage’. Phrases such as these, uttered daily by patients in rehabilitative settings, lead clinicians to think that their hands-on treatments are so powerful that they are sometimes miraculous. Although the literature supports […]
Why do our Interventions Result in Similar Outcomes?
By: Chad Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA; Derek Clewley PT, PhD, FAAOMPT If you’ve seen the movie, Oppenheimer, you may remember him discussing the paradoxical wave-particle duality. This revolved around the finding that light exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. In fact, in certain experiments, light behaves more like a wave, whereas in others, it behaves […]
The Placebo Effect
By: Chad E Cook PT, PhD, FAPTA Definitions Matter In healthcare, the use of appropriate definitions is imperative. I was recently part of an international nominal group technique (a qualitative study that is used to build consensus) that harmonized a definition for contextual factors [1]. Within the literature, contextual factors have been variably described as […]
