Hello,
From what I can tell you guys are pretty against any sort of stretching or massage therapy. However, is it not true that active release therapy can increase range of motion thus making people feel better?
Also, what about research articles claiming that massage and release therapy are beneficial - how can you be sure these articles are completely bogus?
Thanks,
Willy
Sure it can.
However,
To what extent does additional range of motion consistently result in “feeling better”?
To what extent does ART produce consistent, long-term changes in range of motion beyond what’s already achievable with intelligent training? (i.e., without needing to pay someone for your regular treatments)
I talked about my opinions on this much more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVnNMnXRzWU
You’ll have to cite some specific literature if you want a specific answer. We don’t have time to write you a critical review of the literature here, unfortunately.
I’m interested in learning how to critique research articles on Pub MD – I’ve watching Dr. Sullivan’s literature review videos.
If you had any advice for learning how to do this I would GREATLY appreciate it!
Also, when you are writing articles how do you determine what sources to include – a simple search on Pub MD will lead to thousands of articles. Do you just read one by one and figure out which one is legitimate, then include it in your footnotes?
Thanks for the response,
Will
This is a huge topic, far bigger than I can address in a forum reply. Sully’s videos are a fine place to start. The biggest thing is just practice. The more you read, the better you’ll get at it.
PubMed does often provide a huge number of results, but if you can learn how to use the advanced search functions and/or filters, you can refine your search and return a more manageable list to sift through.
Will -
Depending on your background there are a few things that can make your journey a bit smoother when diving into the morass of scientific literature. The first thing to understand is that each scientific or medical field will have its own set of jargon, shorthand and insider knowledge. This can make what should a straight forward block text seem like a a jumble of words. Furthermore, depending on the context the jargon might have different meaning across fields. Fortunately the internet can help you look-up things and help provide clarity. As Austin said, practice and indeed you will begin to pick-up patterns and the jargon the more papers you read.
Speaking of searches, search for “How to read a scientific paper”. There a number of good articles written on various science blogs as well as ones by professors for students. When I just did a quick review now, I noted a far amount of plagiarism but you should take a look at at least 10 to get a fair sampling.
An understanding of the use and abuse of statistics is also helpful. If you have not had formal training in statistics you are in luck because there is free training available. The on-line courses by Udacity are quite good. Here is a sampling
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statistics--ud827
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statistics--ud201
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-statistics--st101
There are plenty of articles and books on the misuse of statistics.
That will get you started.
Good luck.
If I may add to this discussion to provide OP with some direction:
To learn the basics on how to critique a research paper, you may want to start by reading this: https://www.ucalgary.ca/ssc/files/ssc/wss_critique_2014.pdf
I don’t mean to speak for Austin or Jordan but seeing as my views align nicely with theirs I can say with relative certainty that no one is saying that manual therapy doesn’t help a person feel better, the question comes down to the mechanism of action of the therapy and why resistance exercise is preferred over various forms of manual therapy, like ART, for more long-term benefits (i.e. pain relief, increased range of motion, soft tissue therapy etc).
Proponents of ART (I once was an ART provider myself and believed this narrative as this is what was taught in the seminars) would have you believe that they are manually effecting structural change to soft tissue as described in the ART patent: https://www.google.ca/patents/US6283916
We know this is not possible because it would require a tremendous amount of force to do so: http://jaoa.org/article.aspx?articleid=2093620
This review succinctly explains why ART or other manual therapies can never truly be evidence based: http://rfkidd.com/myofascial-release-kidd.pdf
This doesn’t mean that manual therapy, lending to a placebo effect in the absence of a concrete mechanism of action, is not effective in short-term pain relief or short-term increased flexibility/range of motion. It can be effective, just not for the reasons that most people believe (i.e. no bony realignment or soft tissue structural change is actually occurring). The onus here lies in the narrative that a manual therapy provider supplies to his/her patients. A provider can be honest with his/her patients and explain that the mechanism of the therapy employed is not well understood and can still provide symptomatic relief of a person’s complaints, resulting in positive outcomes http://media.virbcdn.com/files/e2/967964ac72409a85-CarvalhoPAIN2016.pdf.
But it is also equally important for a provider to inform his/her patients that exercise in the form of resistance training is a powerful intervention, with well understood mechanisms of action, that can effectively confer actual structural soft tissue change for more sustained physical attributes/benefits, in the case of this discussion; range of motion.
I will make one caveat: this recommendation against pursuing additional dedicated time and resources to stretching or manual therapy treatments is meant for members of the general population. For people who rely on or require greater than average range of motion for specific activities (i.e. gymnasts, ballet dancers, hockey goalies, MMA fighters etc.), I would argue that regular stretching is mandated for successful participation in such activities as it serves as practice for the movements to be performed.
I hope this may clear up some confusion.
Wow, thank you JHG – I’m reading the links you included, I really appreciate it.
I can see now how important understanding statistics is for understanding research itself. I’m going to take that Udacity course.