Curious?

You just haven't bothered to look for evidence about reflexology. If you look at Medline you will even find brain scans for reflexology. Pontificating is easy. Research is hard.

Must be nice to get paid for this drivel. Dogs bark at what they don't understand.

Kevin Kunz

Reflexology Research Project

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/163145.php

Has the "Reflexology Research Project" been keeping its research a secret?

Thanks for the comment Kevin. I only wish you could have spent your time more productively by describing problems with my arguments rather than ad hominem attacks. I wonder what you do when clients ask questions about whether reflexology is better than a massage or a sugar pill. Seriously.

cordially,
Todd

Thank you for an excellent article with useful advice.

There are a lot of practitioners of non-mainstream health systems and techniques who believe very strongly that they have useful skills and methods and want very much to gather evidence of their effectiveness. It must be very frustrating, because it is very expensive and very difficult to prove the effectiveness of a treatment against careful controls. And if the theory behind it is not well accepted, then even empirical evidence against controls will be viewed with suspicion.

Acupuncture, for example, has a good deal of empirical evidence for at least certain kinds of uses, but its theoretical basis in traditional Chinese Medicine has kept it from wider acceptance, even as the technology for controls has improved and continues to improve. How do you create a placebo control for a needle? People have come up with some very creative ways of doing this and we have not seen the end of it. Reflexology is not so terribly far from acupuncture in some ways. I don't think it should be rejected out of hand en masse.

Even surgery has a placebo component (perhaps a particularly powerful placebo component) so I can understand their frustration also at continually being compared with placebos. Drugs work at least in part as a result of placebo, in addition to their pharmacological effect.

Ultimately, we do have to rely on reliable evidence for the effectiveness of treatments, above and beyond placebo, but all treatments have some element of expectancy behind their effects, and it will take a lot of work and patience to sort out the treatments from the boost given by expectancy.

The potential "danger" of alternative treatments is to me not so much that they aren't proven, although that can be an issue, but more that odd theories can sometimes lead to slippery slopes where even effective treatments are being done in an extravagant or dangerous way. The "proving" needed is not so much just effectiveness, but also grounding in theory, so that we can tell when variations of the treatment are still reasonable without having to thoroughly test every minor variation of a treatment.

kind regards,

Todd

I was actually more thinking of acupressure treatment in general in my discussion, not reflexology per se. I don't know very much about the specific application of foot pressure points taken in isolation. Up to this point I haven't seen much compelling data on that.

Sorry for the confusion,

Todd

Hi Todd,

I couldn't agree more and in fact, I was just talking about this in my science of well-being class yesterday. I believe there is a lot of evidence and promise to Acupuncture, particularly for substance abuse problems.

Besides the ideas you mentioned, there is the issue of whether the active ingredient unique to chiropractic care, acupuncture, or anything else is what works. For instance, a colleague told me that their chiropractor provides adjustments to deal with subluxations and on top of this, recommends back exercises for him to do at home. There is no research to show that what is unique to the craft of chiropractors works (beyond momentary pain reduction) and what appears to work is the same thing done by other allied health professionals with more appropriate training (e.g., physical therapists). In this care, a person's time and money, and health care costs, can all be handled more efficiently with the use of physical and occupational therapists.

cheers,
Todd

Pilot study finds chiropractic care, physical therapy may reduce costs
Individuals with musculoskeletal disorders who received chiropractic care or physical therapy had lower health care costs and were less likely to have surgery than employees who did not receive those services, according to a recent report.

The findings come from a one-year pilot program designed by Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield to measure patient quality of care. Researchers concluded that significant clinical outcomes and health care cost reductions were attributable to the use of chiropractic and other physical medicine services. Overall, 89 percent of all individuals receiving physical medicine services reported improvement of at least 30 percent within 30 days.

The 2008 pilot -- an ongoing quality improvement program for Iowa and South Dakota physical medicine providers -- analyzed data on care provided by 238 chiropractors, physical therapists and occupational therapists to 5,500 Wellmark members with MSDs. Wellmark utilized Triad Healthcare to help administer the program and collaborated with the company to collect data and measure outcomes. Triad also analyzed the chiropractic and physical therapy utilization data for the pilot and has continued to administer the program in 2009.

Supporters of chiropractic treatment praised the findings, saying that the cost-effectiveness of the method has been documented in several studies.

Glenn Manceaux, president of the American Chiropractic Association, pointed to a study published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics that found chiropractic and medical care have comparable costs for treating chronic low-back pain, with chiropractic care producing significantly better outcomes. In addition, a study published in a 2003 edition of Spine medical journal found that manual manipulation provides better short-term relief of chronic spinal pain than a variety of medications, he said.

"Especially during the health care reform debate, it's important that chiropractic and other conservative care methods are taken into serious consideration as a cost-effective alternative to the utilization of expensive surgery and hospital-based care," he said.

Read more at the WORKERSCOMP ForumTM homepage.

September 10, 2009

Copyright 2009© LRP Publications

Sorry I couldnt just post a link I'm posting from my phone. There have been numerous studies showing the efficacy of Chiropractic manipulation not just manipulation which is what is done by other practitioners. I am a chiropractor am don't personally agree with the subluxation theory per se, but I do know that what I do helps patients everyday and it has been proven repeatedly. If your basing your article off of your experience with one person I think that is a shame. You prooved it yourself that you did no research when you wrote this article and you are more than entitled to your opinion, but to bash an entire professional community over the misgivings you had based on the physician you say helped you for years seems wrong to me. I recommend trying to look into some chiropractors that are more evidenced based if you would like to get some more straightforward answers as to why and how chiropractic care benefits the human body. Just as there are probably some less them trustworthy colleagues in your profession we have ours too. You claim that the founder of chiropractic made those claims in the 1850 about what chiropractic care was, remember it used to be acceptible for medical doctors to perform shock therapy, prescribe arsenic and perform lobotomies on patients. To make it more present, look at the number of FDA approved drugs get that get taken off the market every year because they ultimately don't work correctly. Something that seems in this day an age to, of course, be absurd. Yet it happens time and again and will continue to happen time and again.