Thermal Effects of Manual Therapy in Low Back Pain: A Pilot Study

The aim of this pilot study is to know the thermal impact that manual therapy has on the body temperature of the lower back and abdominal region in subjects with low back pain. It was conducted on ten patients, five of them diagnosed with low back pain and five without it. The intervention protocol was based on Richelli’s instrumentalized manual therapy, it was carried out by a certified physical therapist, one session per week, for two weeks. Infrared Thermography was used to show the effects of this study. The regions of interest considered for the thermal analysis were the rectus abdominis, the obliques, the quadratus lumbar and the lumbar spine. The temperature difference between post and pre-intervention in patients with low back pain was higher in the first week, maintaining differences greater than 0.78, while in the second week the maximum difference was 0.52 in the lumbar area. As a result, the instrumentalized manual intervention technique tends to stabilize the temperature of the muscles, managing to favor the subjects with low back pain because this specific group achieved greater temperature stability in the intervened muscle groups. Infrared Thermography proved to be a useful tool for monitoring physiotherapeutic treatments.