At the 12th World Congress on Low Back and Pelvic Girdle Pain in Porto, three threads ran through session after session: clinicians do not agree, manual assessment matters most, and results are inconsistent. Nobody joined them up.
In this Clinical Insight, Dr Jo Abbott explains why she says musculoskeletal healthcare has a replication crisis, using the term other fields have applied to themselves since Ioannidis (2005). She sets out the known risk factors, and the one missing from the list: a measurement instrument without established validity. Drawing on her doctoral systematic review (3,856 studies screened, zero meeting either COSMIN development standard) and experimental programme, she shows how hands that select patients and judge outcomes produce the inconsistent findings the field keeps reporting, and what researchers, readers and clinicians can do now.
Written to start a conversation, not end one. Fully referenced.
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