Chiropractic services in the active duty military setting: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Musculoskeletal injuries are one of the most prevalent battle and non-battle related injuries in the active duty military. In some countries, chiropractic services are accessed to manage such injuries within and outside military healthcare systems; however, there is no recent description of such access nor outcomes. This scoping review aimed to synthesize published literature exploring the nature, models, and outcomes of chiropractic services provided to active duty military globally. Method: We employed scoping review methodology. Systematic searches of relevant databases, including military collections and hand searches were conducted from inception to October 22, 2018. We included peer-reviewed English literature with qualitative and quantitative designs, describing chiropractic practice and services delivered to active duty military worldwide. Paired reviewers independently reviewed all citations and articles using a two-phase screening process. Data from relevant articles were extracted into evidence tables and sorted by study type. Results were descriptively analyzed. Results: We screened 497 articles and 20 met inclusion criteria. Chiropractic services were commonly provided on-base only in the US. Services were accessed by physician referral and commonly after initiation or non-response to other care. Use of scope of practice was determined by the system/facility, varying from intervention specific to comprehensive services. Back pain with and without radiculopathy accounted for most complaints. Treatment outcomes were reported primarily by case reports. However, two recent randomized trials reported improved pain, disability, and satisfaction when adding chiropractic care to usual medical care compared to usual medical care alone in management of low back pain. Specific reaction time measures in special operation forces military did not improve after chiropractic care compared to wait-list control. Conclusions: Our scoping review found the majority of published articles described chiropractic services in the active duty military in the US setting. Recent RCTs suggest a benefit of including chiropractic care to usual medical care in managing back pain in active duty military. Yet despite reported benefits in Australia, Canada, and the US, there is a need for further qualitative, descriptive, and clinical trial data worldwide to inform the role of chiropractic services in active duty military.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".