Come satisfy your intellectual curiosity, challenge your thinking and reinforce with objective evidence some of the amazing results you see in your office every day.
Come satisfy your intellectual curiosity, challenge your thinking and reinforce with objective evidence some of the amazing results you see in your office every day.
The
traditional chiropractic leg check assesses relative distal leg positions (Y-axis
translations) to identify subluxations and monitor outcomes. The tendency of the
feet to assume asymmetric rotational positions in dorsiflexion/plantarflexion, internal/external
rotation, and inversion/eversion, has been generally assumed to confound LLI determination,
often requiring the examiner to grasp the feet to manually remove these other asymmetries.
To test the assumption that these other elements of non-weight bearing foot posture
amount to mere noise, the investigators constructed a triaxial foot posturometer.
It consists of two orthogonally placed inclinometers and a compass mounted on a surgical
boot, screwed to a wood "footprint." The experimental protocol involved a blinded examiner taking the subject's feet to the "extreme end range" (using
force well beyond what is usually applied to measure passive ROM) in both directions
around each of the 3 orthogonal axes, while other examiners read the gauges and
recorded data. This produced 12 measurements per subject, per trial. In a pilot
involving 5 subjects, each of whom were tested twice, a robust tendency was detected
for increased external rotation (on the side of apparent LLI), ipsilateral inversion,
and contralateral internal rotation inversion to covary. Forced end-range rotational
asymmetries appear more easily measured and reproducible then conventional LLI measurements,
and could ultimately mark an advance in leg checking procedure by serving as a superior
surrogate measure. The investigators are just about to conduct a larger study based
on the pilot, and will present the data at the subluxation conference.