Clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness of massage chair therapy versus basic physiotherapy in lower back pain patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Low back pain is a chronic recurrent symptom, which can lower the patient's quality of life. With technological development of automated home massage systems, now offers a promising alternative to physiotherapy. However, thus far, the effectiveness of such methods has not been evaluated. We aimed to compare the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a massage chair with those of conventional physiotherapy for the treatment. METHODS: This was a randomized controlled trial with a two-group parallel design. Following randomization and allocation, 56 participants were enrolled to receive either physiotherapy (n = 25) or mechanical massage using the massage chair (n = 31). Pain severity was measured using a visual analog scale (VAS) and satisfaction assessed with the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ). Quality of life modification was analyzed using the Functional Rating Index (FRI). Cost-effectiveness was analyzed by comparing the sum of physiotherapy fees and monthly rental fees for chair massage. RESULTS: Physiotherapy and massage chair were both effective for pain control as assessed with the VAS (P < .001), satisfaction as assessed by MPQ (P < .001) and life quality improvement as assessed by FRI (P < .001) in both groups. Both VAS and FRI scores were significantly higher for physiotherapy than for massage chair (P = .03 and P = .03, respectively). There was no significant difference in MPQ between the two groups. Massage chair therapy was more cost-effective than physiotherapy, at only 60.17% of the physiotherapy cost (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: The home massage chair system was cost-effective, but pain control and disability improved more with physiotherapy. However, our results showed that the massage chair is a promising treatment for pain control and quality of life modification, but efficacy is still superior in physiotherapy and the chair is not a replacement for physiotherapy. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical Research Information Service, KCT0003157. Retrospectively registered August 2, 2018.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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".