A Randomized Pragmatic Clinical Trial of Chiropractic Care for Headaches With and Without a Self-Acupressure Pillow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine if the addition of a self-acupressure pillow (SAP) to typical chiropractic treatment results in significantly greater improvement in tension-type and cervicogenic headache sufferers. METHODS: A pragmatic randomized clinical trial was conducted in a chiropractic college teaching clinic. Thirty-four subjects, including tension-type and cervicogenic headache sufferers, 21 to 60 years of age, male or female, completed the study. Group A (n = 15) received typical chiropractic care only (manual therapy and exercises), and group B (n = 19) received typical chiropractic care with daily home use of the SAP. The intervention period was 4 weeks. The main outcome measure was headache frequency. Satisfaction and relief scores were obtained from subjects in the SAP group. Analysis of variance was used to analyze the intergroup comparisons. RESULTS: Owing to failure of randomization to produce group equivalence on weekly headache frequency, analysis of covariance was performed showing a trend (P = .07) favoring the chiropractic-only group; however, this was not statistically significant. Group A obtained a 46% reduction of weekly headache frequency (t = 3.1, P = .002; d = 1.22). The number of subjects in group A achieving a reduction in headaches greater than 40% was 71%, while for group B, this was 28%. The mean benefit score (0-3) in group B of the use of the SAP was 1.2 (.86). The mean satisfaction rating of users of the SAP was 10.4 (2.7) out of 15 (63%). CONCLUSION: This study suggests that chiropractic care may reduce frequency of headaches in patients with chronic tension-type and cervicogenic headache. The use of a self-acupressure pillow (Dr Zaxx device) may help those with headache and headache pain relief as well as producing moderately high satisfaction with use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".