Support for osteopathic manipulative treatment inclusion in chronic pain management guidelines: a narrative review

Context

Osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) is used to treat chronic pain conditions. However, few guidelines focusing on chronic pain management include recommendations for OMT.

Objectives

To evaluate previous literature on the use of OMT for improving chronic pain.

Methods

A literature search was conducted on MEDLINE/PubMed and ScienceDirect on August 26–27, 2019, using the terms “osteopathic,” “chronic,” and “pain,” yielding a total of 312 MEDLINE/PubMed articles and 515 ScienceDirect articles. Eligibility criteria required that studies investigate pain, functional status, or medication usage through an experimental design, focusing on human subjects with chronic pain who had various forms of OMT administered by osteopathically trained individuals in which the comparator group received no intervention, a sham or placebo, or conventional care. Three authors independently performed literature searches and methodically settled disagreements over article selection.

Results

In the 22 articles included in our study that examined OMT use in chronic pain conditions, we evaluated primary outcomes of pain (22; 100%) and functional status (20; 90.9%), and the secondary outcome of medication usage (3; 13.6%). The majority of articles showed that OMT resulted in a significant decrease in pain levels as compared to baseline pain levels or the control group (20; 90.9%) and that OMT resulted in an improvement in functional status (17; 77.3%). In articles that did not find a significant difference in pain (2; 9.1%) or functional status (3; 13.6%), there were overall outcomes improvements noted. All articles that investigated medication usage (3; 13.6%) showed that OMT was effective in decreasing patients’ medication usage. Our study was limited by its small sample size and multimodal comparator group exclusion.

Conclusions

OMT provides an evidence-based management option to reduce pain levels, improve functional status, and decrease medication usage in chronic pain conditions, especially low back pain (LBP). Pain management guidelines should include OMT as a resource to alleviate chronic pain.