Giandomenico D'Alessandro

Centre for Osteopathic MEdicine (COME) Collaboration · Clinical-based Human Research Department

Introduction: Health professionals and bodyworkers may be pivotal in promoting prevention programs, providing tailored advice and guidance to patients’ adherence to self-care strategies, such as physical activity. Contemporary evidence encourages manual therapists to involve patients in decision-making and treatment procedures integrating passive a...

Background: Many efforts are made to find safer and more feasible therapeutic strategies to improve gynaecological care. Non-pharmacological treatments, such as osteopathic interventions, could be used as complementary strategies to better manage different gynaecological conditions. This review aims to report the effectiveness of osteopathic treat...

Background To measure the specific effectiveness of a given treatment in a randomised controlled trial, the intervention and control groups have to be similar in all factors not distinctive to the experimental treatment. The similarity of these non-specific factors can be defined as an equality assumption. The purpose of this review was to evaluate...

Randomised placebo-controlled trials are implemented to determine whether a particular therapy is superior to placebo and can thus be considered, effective. However, adopting the standard RCT design in contexts other than pharmacological trials, such as manual therapy, may result in systematic biases. These biases may occur due to: the impossibilit...

Background: Osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) is a patient-centred, whole-body intervention aimed at enhance the person’s self-regulation. OMT interventions are focused on somatic dysfunctions (SD) that can be defined as an altered regulative function associated with inflammatory signs palpable in the body framework in different body regions...

Due to the significant increase in interest in placebos, biomedical scientists have incorporated placebo innovations into a modern methodological research scenario in order to increase the quality of clinical studies. Indeed, the randomised-controlled trial design has changed dramatically, and these changes have had an impact on manual therapy rese...

Background/Objective The purpose of this study was to cross-culturally adapt the Body Perception Questionnaire Short Form (BPQ-SF) into Italian and to assess its psychometric properties in a sample of Italian subjects. Methods A forward-backward method was used for translation. 493 adults were recruited for psychometric analysis. Structural validi...

Introduction Osteopathy relies on a touch-based approach to promote health. This narrative review aims to analyze the role of touch in clinical osteopathic practice. Methods A database search was conducted using MEDLINE, EMBASE, PEDro and Google Scholar. Peer-reviewed papers without specifying limits on dates and design were included. Results 47...

Background: Self-directed learning is a student-centered approach based on the students' evaluation about their own learning needs. Self-directed practice is a component of the self-directed learning which focus on achieving manual and practical skills. Given the abundance of manual skills that students need to develop in the osteopathic curriculu...

Background: Placebo, defined as "false treatment," is a common gold-standard method to assess the validity of a therapy both in pharmacological trials and manual medicine research where placebo is also referred to as "sham therapy." In the medical literature, guidelines have been proposed on how to conduct robust placebo-controlled trials, but mai...

Abstract Historically, approaches used in manual medicine to explain patient reported symptoms have been focused on the so-called exteroceptive paradigm. Arguably, this mindset lacks an appropriate “reading system” able to interpret musculoskeletal disorders from a different perspective, where the properties of the nervous system are embraced into...

Objective: The aim of the review was to evaluate the effects of the osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) on women with gynaecological and obstetric disorders. Materials and methods: An extensive search from inception to April 2014 was conducted on MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane library using MeSH and free terms. Clinical studies investigating...

Context: Heart Rate Variability (HRV) indicates how heart rate changes in response to inner and external stimuli. HRV is linked to health status and it is an indirect marker of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) function. Objective: To investigate the influence of osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) on ANS activity through changes of High Freq...