Is There a Need for an Animal Model for Spinal Manipulation Research?

Ultimately, we face the questions that patients, students, other health care providers, or other researchers will ask us regarding spinal manipulation: “How does it work?” “What impact does spinal manipulation have?” “What style or technique works best?” “How can we make manipulation techniques more effective?” If we knew the answers to these questions, in the amount of detail that they deserve to be answered, then perhaps we would be more effective with educating our patients, selecting which patient would receive what technique, and how to continue to improve the care we provide. We would be better able to understand the mechanisms of manipulative therapy, which would then result in better research and better patient care. Animal model research might be able to bring us closer to answering such questions.

Publication of animal model research in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics is not new. For example, nearly 20 years ago, De Boer and McKnight published a study proposing a surgical method in rabbits to mimic the conditions of chiropractic subluxation or spinal fixation that would help us better understand this phenomenon in the spine.1 In 2001, Pickar and Wheeler demonstrated the physiological effects of manipulation and preload on the spine using an animal model.2 And in 2004, Kawchuk et al demonstrated an animal model that could investigate a complication that would normally not be able to be evaluated in humans in a prospective manner.3 Publication of animal models of spinal fixation has been reported in other journals as well.4, 5, 6

In this issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, Henderson et al present a new animal model for consideration. Although the use of animal models in research is not new, investigating a new technique is essential for the growth of this type of basic science research. Providing a model for reversible spinal fixations can help us to explore a whole new set of questions that up until this point have not yet been answered.