Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Low back pain is one of the most common and costly musculoskeletal problems in modern societies. Proponents of massage therapy claim it can minimize pain and disability, and speed return to normal function. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of massage therapy for non-specific low back pain. SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched Medline, Embase, Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, Healthstar, CINAHL and Dissertation abstracts from 1966 to 1999 with no language restrictions. References in the included studies and in reviews of the literature were also screened. Contact with content experts and massage associations were also made. SELECTION CRITERIA: This review included randomized, quasi-randomized or controlled clinical trials that investigated the use of any type of massage (using the hands or a mechanical device) as a treatment for nonspecific low back pain. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: One reviewer applied the selection criteria and extracted the data. Two reviewers (one blinded to authors, institutions and journals) independently assessed the quality of each trial. A qualitative analysis (best-evidence synthesis) was performed due to clinical heterogeneity among the included trials and insufficient data reported. MAIN RESULTS: Four randomized controlled trials met the inclusion criteria. Two trials were of high and two of low methodological quality. None evaluated massage as the main intervention. Rather, it was the control intervention in studies evaluating manipulation, electrical stimulation, and a lumbar corset. There is limited evidence showing that massage is less effective than manipulation immediately after the first session and moderate evidence showing it is less effective than TENS during the course of sessions in relieving pain and improving activity. At the completion of treatment and at 3 weeks after discharge there is no difference among massage and manipulation, electrical stimulation or corsets, but this evidence is limited. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS: Based on the studies reviewed, there is insufficient evidence to recommend massage as a stand-alone treatment for non-specific low back pain. There is a need for high quality controlled trials to further evaluate the effects of massage for this condition.
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 | 0.063 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.023 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.045 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".