"Buried in a court document mentioning Joe Mercola was the first reference to naprapathy I had ever seen. Joe Mercola has made a fortune selling dietary supplements and publishing health misinformation over the past few decades. The court case did not involve Mercola but rather a woman he had treated. In her lawsuit against a life insurance company, the plaintiff is described as having been bitten by a tick and contracting Lyme disease. After seeing Mercola (who tended to her with “diet and herbal treatments”), she went to see a naprapath. I had to do a double take. What exactly was a naprapath?
"Naprapathy is a manual therapy, much like chiropractic, osteopathy, and massage therapy. It’s all about using hands to tug at and massage body parts, although it often also extends to dietary and exercise advice and to non-invasive complements like ultrasound therapy. Its scientific evaluation barely exists, and while some component of it might be salvageable, I’m not sure naprapaths themselves are right for the job."
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There are several reasons why Naprapathy has a relatively small research base, and lack of evidence should not automatically be confused with evidence of ineffectiveness.
ReplyDeleteOne major issue is economics. Drug companies, device manufacturers, hospitals, and surgical industries have enormous financial incentives to fund research because a successful drug, implant, or procedure can generate billions of dollars. Naprapathy has no major industry standing behind it. If Naprapathy proves effective, the primary beneficiaries are essentially the patient and the treating Naprapath. With relatively few Naprapaths and comparatively small professional associations, there simply isn’t the money available to finance large multicenter clinical trials or major marketing campaigns.
Yet the research that has been conducted is very encouraging. Researchers affiliated with the highly respected Karolinska Institutet in Sweden conducted a randomized controlled trial of 409 patients and found statistically significant improvements in pain, disability, and perceived recovery favoring Naprapathic manual therapy over evidence-based physician advice; benefits remained significant through one year. Another randomized trial found Naprapathic manual therapy produced better outcomes than conventional orthopedic care for certain nonsurgical musculoskeletal patients. Karolinska researchers have also conducted a much larger 1,057-patient randomized trial examining components of Naprapathic treatment.
Naprapathy also doesn’t exist in isolation. Its methods substantially overlap with treatments used in physical therapy, chiropractic/manual therapy, traditional osteopathy, massage therapy, myofascial release, structural integration/Rolfing, mobilization, stretching and therapeutic exercise. Consequently, a considerable body of research supports individual techniques used by Naprapaths even when the word Naprapathy never appears in the study.
So the reasonable challenge is this: rather than dismiss Naprapathy because the profession lacks the financial resources to produce thousands of studies, better-funded professions and universities should conduct rigorous head-to-head trials comparing Naprapathic care with chiropractic, physical therapy, orthopedic care and other conservative treatments. If another profession consistently produces better patient outcomes, the evidence should demonstrate it. And if Naprapathy does, patients deserve to know that too.
It's foundation is based on unsupported claims about fascia. This is no different than the unsupported claims of spinal subluxations:
Deletehttps://www.google.com/search?q=Naprapathy+bogus&rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1132US1132&oq=Naprapathy+bogus