Osteopathy in Australia is a primary care limited scope practice. Practitioner surveys suggest that patients present with chronic pain and receive manual therapies, exercise and lifestyle advice. Further research is required to deepen the understanding of this intervention from the perspective of patients.
To explore the experience of patients receiving osteopathic healthcare.
Mixed methodology.
A quantitative survey of a convenience sample of patients was followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews in a purposive sample of respondents with chronic non-specific low back pain. The transcripts were analysed using a phenomenological approach.
The survey results suggested directions of enquiry for the interviews. Eleven subjects were interviewed and reported commonalities in their clinical histories with multisystem co-morbidities. Four themes became apparent: patient decision-making, patient shared experiences of the osteopathic healthcare consultation, tailored patient-centred care, and therapeutic relationship in healthcare.
This data suggests that patients experience osteopathic healthcare after trying other disciplines; that there are shared aspects of the consultations, with a thorough assessment, education about their condition, multiple manual therapies and lifestyle advice; that the experience is patient-centred and tailored to their context; and that the therapeutic relationship is a key aspect of the experience. These results reflect a number of aspects of osteopathic healthcare from workplace surveys.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 02 January 2016.
All research outputs
#16,281,500
of 27,780,120 outputs
Outputs from Manual Therapy
#274
of 417 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#202,174
of 399,722 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Manual Therapy
#15
of 24 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,780,120 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 41st percentile – i.e., 41% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 417 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 11.0. This one is in the 48th percentile – i.e., 48% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 24 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 33rd percentile – i.e., 33% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
