Long-term stability of reducing cervical kyphosis via Chiropractic Biophysics® extension traction procedures: a case series.
Tim C Norton, Paul A Oakley, Jason W Haas and 1 others
PMID 41492258WHAT IT FOUND
In five people with chronic neck pain and a reversed neck curve, a package of traction, manipulation and exercises straightened the curve and cut pain from 5.5/10 to 0.4/10.
Around 60% of the correction held after treatment stopped.
Key findings
01Pain and disability improved in all five patients: average pain fell from 5.5 out of 10 to 0.4, and neck disability from 30.4% to 6.4%, after an average of 41 treatments over two to four months.
02The cervical kyphosis reduced from a mean of 15.3° before treatment to −2.8° after it, and about 60% of that correction was still present at follow-up.
03With no treatment in between, the curve partly relapsed by the long-term re-assessment: on average 10.0° of the lordosis gain and 7.3° of the kyphosis reduction were lost, pain rose 0.8 out of 10, and disability did not change.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Five people from a single clinic's files, with no comparison group. Neck pain often improves on its own, and the attention of being treated regularly can change how people report it, so nothing here separates the treatment from the passage of time. Everyone received traction, manipulation, in-clinic exercises and daily home traction at the same time, so the contribution of any one component cannot be separated from the others. The radiographs and the pain and disability questionnaires were collected and read without any blinding, and the same clinic both delivered the treatment and judged the result. The follow-up window is wide, from 11.5 months to 3.7 years, which is a long and uneven period for a curve that shifts slowly. These patients may not resemble yours: average age 38 and average body mass index 31, all well enough to attend three to four sessions a week and to do daily home traction for two to four months. The authors state that no clinical trial yet exists for correcting a cervical kyphosis with this method, and they call for one; this series is a description of what happened in one practice, not a test of the treatment.
Declared interests
Every author is financially or structurally tied to the method being studied. One sits on the board of CBP NonProfit, one is a compensated consultant for it, one is a compensated researcher for it, and one is the president of that foundation and the CEO of Chiropractic BioPhysics, the company that distributes the spine rehabilitation devices used in this study and provides postgraduate education to health care providers. No independent funding source is declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that extension traction straightens the neck, or that straighter alignment is what reduced the pain. It is five patients with no comparison group, and every one of them had traction, manipulation, in-clinic exercises and daily home traction on a Denneroll at the same time. No single part can be credited, the improvement could have happened anyway, and the authors sell both the method and the devices it uses.
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 →