palpatory

History taking and palpatory skills will also be presented.

Identifying a perfect (error free) reference standard for each palpatory test is challenging.

Therefore, the pain provocative palpatory tests used were demonstrated to have high construct validity.

Content experts in this field should come to an agreement on acceptable reference standards for spinal palpatory tests.

Instead they attempt to correlate the findings of a palpatory procedure with another measurable outcome.

In particular, there is no agreed upon reference or "gold" standard measuring device for spinal palpatory procedures.

A macroscopic palpatory assessment of the fusion mass and the intertransverse space was performed.

Treatment requires continual palpatory feedback to achieve release of myofascial tissues.

This comprehensive systematic review has highlighted serious gaps in our knowledge about the accuracy of spinal palpatory procedures.

However, most reviews are discipline-specific despite the fact that similar spinal palpatory procedures are used across disciplines.

They maintain that studies addressing the validity of spinal palpatory diagnostic tests are quantitative studies.

Thus, palpatory vertebral motion diagnostic tests are prime examples of tests accepted on face validity.

The visual analog pain scale has been used as a pragmatic reference standard for palpatory pain provocation tests.

The evaluation of the validity of spinal palpatory procedures has a number of methodological challenges.

To translate these results into the clinical setting, additional studies exploring the content validity of spinal palpatory exams, using accepted reference standards are needed.

Only two systematic reviews of spinal palpatory validity studies have been published [ 29 30 ] .

Many construct validity studies on diagnostic spinal palpatory tests compare a test's results to another measurement of abnormal physiology in the same region.

Objective: A pilot study was conducted to determine whether untrained examiners could agree on palpatory findings in the cervical spine.

It requires a high degree of psychomotor skills,anatomical identification and tactile expertise, collectively known as palpatory literacy.

Spinal palpatory diagnostic procedures, like vertebral joint motion restriction assessment, are difficult to objectively measure in humans.

Or, one examiner uses pain provocation, and the other palpatory motion restriction sense to assess for a dysfunctional vertebral segment.

Our research question was: "What is the validity of spinal palpatory procedures for diagnosis in patients with spinal neuromuscular dysfunction?"

Discussion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive systematic review of literature on the content validity of spinal palpatory procedures.

Unfortunately, most of the research study results reported are not comparable due to variability in the palpatory tests, terminology, research design, methodology and statistical analysis utilized.

Along with the history of illness and physical exam, examiners utilize specific spinal palpatory diagnostic tests in order to identify spinal neuro-musculoskeletal dysfunction.