One Physiotherapy Session Enough to Treat Whiplash Injury

Australian researchers have found out that car accident victims who suffer from whiplash injury do not need to undergo 20 sessions of physiotherapy as just one session of half-an-hour duration is enough for recovery. The study conducted by George Institute and The University of Queensland was published in The Lancet medical journal.

As part of the study, two groups of whiplash injury victims were given the two forms of treatment. One group received 20 one-hour, customised and supervised exercise sessions that lasted for over 12 weeks.

For the other group, the treatment consisted of just one half-an-hour physiotherapy meeting which gave out a simple educational booklet and taught patients how to exercise on their own.

Senior author Professor Chris Maher of The George Institute and The University of Sydney said, “This study backed the use of physiotherapy, but showed that brief physiotherapy programmes are as effective for chronic whiplash as more intensive programmes.”

The trial involved 172 people and was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and the third party insurance regulators in the states.

Maher said, “Traditionally physiotherapy involved long courses of one-to-one care. More recently, it’s become clear that to deliver physiotherapy more efficiently traditional treatments need to be reconfigured from long programmes to effective, simple treatments where the patient is actively involved.”

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Source-Medindia