Appropriate translational designs for determining causal force-based (manual therapy) treatment mechanisms.
Chad Cook, Damian Keter, Garrett Bullock, John Burns, Cynthia Green, M Terry Loghmani, Beth Winkelstein, Giacomo Rossettini, William R Reed
No finding to report.
This is a commentary on how to design research studies of manual therapy mechanisms; it contains no patient data and no results.
What this paper is
This is a methodological commentary by members of a National Institutes of Health working group that outlines five statistical and design approaches (mediation analyses, longitudinal structural equation modeling, joint latent class models, time-lagged analyses, and cross-lagged panel designs) that could be used to study how manual therapy produces its effects. It reports no patients, no intervention, and no outcomes. There is no finding here to change your practice on.
Declared interests
One author (Giacomo Rossettini) leads education programmes on placebo and nocebo effects and runs private continuing-professional-development courses. He was not involved in the peer review of this article. No funding source is named.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →