Articles related toMusculoskeletal Medicine and Pain

The authors used lumbar spine ultrasonography to measure differences in soft tissue thickness before and after OMT to assess improvements in rotational asymmetry in 20 adult participants; they also evaluated the correlation of US results with palpatory diagnosis.

In this brief Commentary, the authors write an update on research published previously in the Journal, giving a summary of the current recommendations for nuanced diagnosis and management of sports related concussion.

This case report highlights the potentially underrecognized subtype of unilateral eosinophilic fasciitis (EF) in a 28 year old man. With fewer than 300 reported encounters to date, EF is a rare disease that eludes clinicians by presenting as a scleroderma like syndrome. As EF remains a clinical diagnosis, biopsy results may be nonspecific, and the disease can easily be misdiagnosed (or missed entirely) if a full thickness biopsy is not reviewed by a dermatopathologist. The authors also emphasize the importance of internationally accepted diagnostic criteria, of which at least two different sets exist.

In this review incorporating data from 40 previously-published articles, the author uses the 5 models of osteopathic care to illustrate how cellular processes and neural reflexes interact to create work-related musculoskeletal pathology and provides evidence-informed musculoskeletal injury and disability prevention recommendations.

While osteopathic manipulative treatment is known to reduce symptoms in patients with headache disorders, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, so the authors describe the results from their original study of 30 osteopathic medical students in which they evaluated blood flow in the intracranial and extracranial vasculature before and after occipitoatlantal decompression (OAD) using Doppler ultrasonography.

Evidence has shown that spinal mobilization with leg movement (SMWLM) and progressive inhibition of neuromuscular structures (PINS) are individually effective in the management of lumbar radiculopathy, but previous studies reported data for only a short term study period and did not investigate the effect of the combined manual therapy techniques. In this randomized study, the authors compared the combined effects SMWLM and PINS with the individual techniques alone in 60 patients.

The authors conducted a retrospective review of medical records from 182 athletes between 11 and 18 years old who sustained a concussion between 2016-2018 and were treated by the same clinician utilizing a revised approach to concussion management, to determine whether changes in concussion management over the past 7 years have hastened the resolution of symptoms in first-time, sports-related concussions.

Since recent studies have suggested a connection between low back pain (LBP) and urinary tract infections (UTI), the authors reviewed the charts of 20 selected patients with nonspecific LBP who were treated at a single physical therapy center to assess whether manual treatment relieved UTI and reduced pain through improvement in kidney mobility.

In this pre-post study of 476 participants enrolled in a pain registry, the author measured changes in utilization of nonpharmacological and pharmacological treatments for chronic low back pain and related outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic to help quantify how the pandemic has impacted the delivery of health care services throughout the United States.