Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68178
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT RESEARCH ARTICLE COMPONENTS, SEE PAST ARTICLES FROM THE SOMATIC RESEARCH COLUMN IN THE DIGITAL EDITION AT WWW.MASSAGEANDBODYWORK.COM. high-level terms; I can imagine an experienced practitioner would consider that description sufficient, while a newer practitioner might appreciate more specific procedural information. A general principle of scientific and medical research articles is that the author should give the reader information to replicate the work. A good article will, or it will point to another source. By that guideline, did Perlman et al. give you enough information to replicate the work? LIMITATIONS AND STRENGTHS WEAK POINTS In the last article, I posed questions about possible weak points in the study. What problems or gaps did Perlman's team find with previous massage research studies (from the Introduction)? What limitations in their own study did they address (in the Discussion)? In your assessment, are any of these problems severe enough to invalidate their study? They lost a "noteworthy" number of their study participants for follow up, meaning they couldn't trace the long- lasting results with those participants. They point out that this limitation is an artifact of the real-world clinical experience of working with a population of this age, who experiences limitation in mobility and for whom the logistics of a study may pose a hardship. Another methodological issue was the increased possibility of a Hawthorne effect (positive outcome bias on the part of the study participants due to attention from the researchers) because of their efforts to address the problem of "placebo massage," another recurring basic methodological problem in massage research. While they believe that the intragroup and intergroup differences in outcomes (and the persistence of those positive effects) are an argument against that positive bias, it is worth attention. Although Swedish massage is a common treatment technique, the parameters for choosing the type, number, and length of massages was a factor in designing this study. The researchers state that their approach is not necessarily the most effective, and this issue needs to be addressed further. Study participants were overwhelmingly white women from a limited geographical range; this may limit how well the results can be generalized to more diverse groups with OA. However, these researchers note that the study is based on the population in which knee pain is the most prevalent. For a chronic condition, 16 weeks comprise a very short slice of time and longer-term studies would be appropriate. Additionally, they cannot reliably assess any change in usage of pain medications, because the study participants did not keep accurate medication diaries, although it is unlikely that massage would cause them to use more pain medication. THE VALUE OF STRUCTURE I posed the question: having read the article, do you think the Abstract is an accurate representation of it? I think the Abstract accurately represented the information in the article, and the structured format of the abstract made it easier to find particular information. Structure also became my own answer to the question: what else is notable? I found the highly organized structure made Perlman's article easier to read than many others. The headings they used inside each Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) section gave an indication of what to expect, making it easier to understand the overall study. BRING IT HOME Now that we've both located research and evaluated its relevance to your work, hopefully you'll find this a replicable process for your future needs. This article was carefully chosen to provide a good example for the exercise, but it's not always that easy to find good evidence-based information for the questions that come up in practice. How much did our exercise reflect your real-life experience in finding research articles to inform your practice? practitioner and biomedical informatician in Seattle, Washington. She has practiced massage at the former Refugee Clinic at Harborview Medical Center and in private practice. In addition to teaching research methods in massage since 1996, she is the author of an upcoming book on research literacy in massage. Contact her at researching. massage@gmail.com. Ravensara S. Travillian is a massage NOTE 1. All quotations cited here are from Adam I. Perlman et al., "Massage Therapy for Osteoarthritis of the Knee: a Randomized Controlled Trial," Archives of Internal Medicine 166, no. 22 (December 2006): 2,533–8. connect with your colleagues on massageprofessionals.com 131