Incomplete reporting of manual therapy interventions and a lack of clinician and setting diversity in clinical trials for neck pain limits replication and real-world translation. A scoping review.

INTRODUCTION: Neck pain is a leading cause of disability, and manual therapy (MT) is a common intervention used across disciplines and settings to treat it. While there is consistent support for MT in managing neck pain, questions remain about the feasibility of incorporating MT from research into clinical practice. The purpose of this scoping review was to assess how adequately the descriptions of MT interventions are reported and identify the clinicians and settings in MT trials for neck pain.

METHODS: Medline (via PubMed), CINAHL, PEDRo, and the Cochrane Central Registry for Controlled Trials were searched for clinical trials published from January 2010 to November 2021. A 11-item tool modified from the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template was used to assess reporting. Clinicians, subclassifications of neck pain, and clinical settings were also extracted.

RESULTS: 113 trials met final inclusion criteria. Results showed that a low percentage of studies provided the recommended level of detail in the description of how MT was delivered (4.4%), with greater than a third (39.0%) including no description. . Just over half of trials included clinician's qualifications (58.4%), dose of MT (59.3%), and occurrence of adverse events (55.8%). The clinicians delivering MT were physical therapists (77.9%), chiropractors (10.6%), and osteopaths (2.7%).

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: These results reveal incomplete reporting of essential treatment parameters, and a lack of diversity in clinicians delivering MT. . This limits reproducibilityand generalizability of the literature. To foster reproducibility researchers should report detailed descriptions of MT interventions. Future research should incorporate a variety of MT practitioners to improve generalizability.