A Survey of Healthcare Practitioners on Myofascial Pain Criteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The goal of this study was to assess agreement on signs and symptoms of myofascial pain for chiropractors, physicians, and registered massage therapists. METHODS: 337 healthcare practitioners participated in the survey. The questionnaire probed clinician agreement with the chosen signs and symptoms using a 7-point agreement scale (1 = absolutely agree, 7 = absolutely disagree). Agreement was assessed using intraclass correlation within chiropractor, physician, and registered massage therapist groups and across all groups. Descriptive statistics, including mean response values, were used to assess which signs or symptoms were most often associated with myofascial pain. RESULTS: There was poor agreement within chiropractors, physicians, and registered massage therapists on the criteria that represent myofascial pain syndrome. Physicians and massage therapists were in agreement on 4 items and disagreed on 2 items. Chiropractors were in agreement on a different set of signs and symptoms relative to physicians and registered massage therapists, and they expressed neutrality on most statements in the questionnaire. Registered massage therapists were in most agreement amongst each other as a group (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.80) relative to chiropractors (ICC = 0.59) and physicians (ICC = 0.51). DISCUSSION: Our results suggest that there is a lack of agreement within and between healthcare practitioner groups on the signs and symptoms that define myofascial pain syndrome. We suggest the demonstrated variability in diagnostic knowledge be remedied through the establishment and universal use of official validated criteria. Future research should focus on developing criteria specific to myofascial pain syndrome. Finally, knowledge translation strategies may be implemented to increase clinician knowledge of available criteria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".