26/02/2026
Don't believe the hype 🤜🏼
How do we therapists explain how treatment(/s) work?
If you seek treatment, what is your understanding of how treatment works?
Do the two align?
... does it matter?!
For therapists, know that our treatments *do* help people in pain (1). Generally speaking, when we follow the 'do no harm' mantra, most treatment modalities (whichever your favourite flavour) offer some pain-relief, and this is vital, and - often - the sole reason for someone booking an appointment.
The mechanics of 'how the treatment works', however, seem to matter less than which treatment modality we choose (2) with other variables including natural history (healing rates), regression to mean, contextual effects (including patient and therapist preferences), biases (including patient and therapist history, experience and expectations), and of course .... drumroll ... placebo (3) taking at least equal importance.
For you, the person in pain, you can rest assured that Manual Therapy treatments have great scope to help people in pain ... just not always in the way that social media would will have us believe 👍🏼
📄1. Effectiveness of treatments for acute and subacute mechanical non-specific low back pain: a systematic review with network meta-analysis. Gianloa et al., 2021
📄2. Do manual therapies help low back pain? A comparative effectiveness meta-analysis, Menke 2014
📄3. Placebo 2.0: the impact of expectations on analgesic treatment outcome, Ulrike, 2020
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🙏 In pain and want that to change? Drop me a message on here!
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