Applying Pain Adaptability to Manual Therapy Practice

Mechanism research has identified pain adaptive and non-adaptive phenotypes by documenting the response to an ice immersion bath. Pain adaptive individuals exhibited a rapid response to cold and a rapid resolution of symptoms with continued exposure. Non-pain adaptive individuals had the opposite. Pain-adaptive individuals have the endogenous (internal) capacity to self-modulate pain therefore may pursue active self management techniques, whereas non-pain adaptive phenotypes may be more prone to use of external mechanisms (e.g., analgesic medications) for pain relief. A pain adaptive individual is likely to benefit from all forms of conservative active or passive pain modulatory treatments and is expected to have a favorable prognosis. Although this finding is useful, ice bath immersion is an impractical assessment for clinical practice, leaving clinicians with the inability to identify pain adaptive individuals. Emerging evidence indicates that an associative clinical response associated with an early within session (during the first visit) and between session (from the first to the second visit) during a posterior to anterior mobilization, identifies individuals who have a favorable prognosis with spinal pain. While neurophysiological basis for the analgesic effect of manual therapy has been proposed to date no one has investigated if the associative clinical response is purely another way of identifying pain adaptive or non-pain adaptive individuals. If a within-session or between-session response is associated with the pain adaptive mechanism found during an ice-bath immersion, clinicians could adopt the clinical evaluation technique and improve their ability to identify proper patients for management. The investigators will evaluate the relationship between the pain adaptive mechanistic response from ice-bath immersion and the associative clinical response that occurs during a PA mobilization of the spine.