{"id":4767,"date":"2017-06-01T02:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T06:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=4767"},"modified":"2017-06-01T09:28:21","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T13:28:21","slug":"a-new-study-on-effectiveness-of-taiji-to-relieve-neck-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2017\/06\/a-new-study-on-effectiveness-of-taiji-to-relieve-neck-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Study on Effectiveness of Taiji to Relieve Neck Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Research Method<\/span>:\u00a0<\/strong> This field test research project was conducted between September 2014 and March 2015 in the Department of Complementary and Integrative Medicine in Essen, Germany.\u00a0 The project divided the test group into three subgroups: (1) a Taiji Group, (2) a conventional Neck Exercise Therapy Group, and (3) a No Treatment Group.\u00a0 The average age of the 114 chosen participants was 49.5, and the group consisted of 91 women and 23 men.\u00a0 The participants were randomly assigned to the three groups.\u00a0 Over a period of 12 weeks, Group 1 and Group 2 each met once per week for 75-90 minutes.\u00a0 For each session, Group 1 started with 5-10 minutes of warm-up exercises, followed by about 45 minutes of practicing the Yang Style 13 Form (depending on how the forms are counted, it is also sometimes called the Yang Style 16 Form), and ended with 5-10 minutes of relaxation exercises.\u00a0 Similarly Group 2 also started with 5-10 minutes of warm-up exercises and ended with 5-10 minutes of relaxation exercises, and sandwiched in-between about 45 minutes of neck therapy exercises similar to those taught in rehabilitation program containing exercises and education for a healthy neck.\u00a0 Group 1 was also supposed to practice at home at least 15 minutes of Taiji each day.\u00a0 Group 2 was also supposed to practice at home at least 15 minutes of the neck exercises each day.\u00a0 Group 3 did not practice or had treatment because it was a No Treatment Group.<\/p>\n

Research Finding<\/span>:\u00a0 <\/strong>The project measured various results at the end of 12 weeks.\u00a0 The primary measurement was “pain on movement” (POM) when participants were asked to flex, extend, laterally flex, and laterally rotate their necks to the left and right.\u00a0 The evoked pain was measured on a 100-mm visual analogue scale (VAS) for each direction.\u00a0 An average POM score was then calculated from these data for each participant.\u00a0 A measurement of the physical limitation from their neck pain was the Neck Disability Index (NDI) that was a 10-item questionnaire that determines how participants see their neck pain affects their daily activities.\u00a0 There was also a measurement of the health-related physical and mental quality of life using the Short Form 36 Health Survey Questionnaire.\u00a0 In addition, there was also a psychological well-being measurement on stress resistance, ability to enjoy, vitality, and inner peace using the Questionnaire on the Assessment of Physical Well-being.<\/p>\n

The results show that at the end of 12 weeks there were statistically meaningful improvements in all four measurements for the Taiji Group, and of course basically no improvements for the No Treatment Group.\u00a0 Similarly, there were statistically meaningful improvements in all four measurements for the Neck Exercise Therapy Group.\u00a0 No significant difference was found between the Taiji Group and the Neck Exercise Therapy Group.\u00a0 This means that doing Taiji can be an alternative to doing Neck Exercise Therapy for the treatment of chronic nonspecific neck pain.\u00a0 The project also did some measurements at the end of 24 weeks, even though organized treatments were carried out for only 12 weeks.\u00a0 The results at 24 weeks still showed improvements of the Taiji Group and the Neck Exercise Therapy Group over the No Treatment Group.<\/p>\n

Final Comments<\/span>:\u00a0 <\/strong>The Taiji exercises performed by the participants in this project were just a simple set of normal Taiji exercises.\u00a0 They were not selected to be specific for treating neck pains.\u00a0 This means that the same kinds of Taiji exercises that have been found to be useful to treat many kinds of health ailments [3] are also useful for treating neck pains.\u00a0 More importantly, it shows that the basic ingredients of Taiji, its soft and slow movements coupled with breathing and relaxation techniques, can provide general health improvements that can also improve many specific ailments. [4]<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

[1] The abstract of the article:\u00a0 “The Effects of Tai Chi and Neck Exercises in the Treatment of Chronic Nonspecific Neck Pain:\u00a0 A Randomized Controlled Trial.”<\/a><\/p>\n

[2] For the full article, see The Journal of Pain<\/strong><\/em>, Vol. 17, No 9 (September), 2016; pp1013-1027.<\/p>\n

[3] “Health Benefits of Taiji”<\/a>, January 2010.\u00a0 “A Comprehensive of Health Benefits of Qigong and Tai Chi”<\/a>, December 2010.\u00a0 “Effectiveness of Taiji Versus Physical Therapy for Knee Osteoarthritis”<\/a>, September 2016.<\/p>\n

[4] “Why Taiji Is Beneficial to Health”<\/a>, September 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the treatment of chronic nonspecific neck pain, an international (Germany, Australia, China, and U.S.) research team recently found that doing Taiji (another spelling is Tai Chi) is just as effective as doing neck exercise therapy, and significantly more effective than not doing anything at all.\u00a0 Their finding was published in the September 2016 issue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4767"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4800,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4767\/revisions\/4800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}