Wade King, Peter Lau, Richard Lees and Nikolai Bogduk
Although manual therapists believe that they can diagnose symptomatic joints in the neck by manual examination, that conviction is based on only one study. That study claimed that manual examination of the neck had 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity for diagnosing painful zygapophyseal joints.The present study was undertaken to answer the call for replication studies. The objective was to determine the sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratio of manual examination for the diagnosis of cervical zygapophyseal joint pain. The results showed that manual examination had a high sensitivity for cervical zygapophyseal joint pain, at the segmental levels commonly symptomatic, but its specificity was poor. Likelihood ratios barely greater than 1.0 indicated that manual examination lacked validity. Although the results obtained were less favorable than those of the previous study, paradoxically they were statistically not different.
The Spine Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1,