Introduction
Research highlights many benefits of exercise including improving general health, wellbeing and specific medical conditions such as stroke and osteoporosis.1 In musculoskeletal conditions such as chronic low back pain (LBP) and neck pain, prescribed exercise has been demonstrated to be moderately effective in decreasing pain and improving function.2,3 Moreover, prescribing exercise as part of the management for musculoskeletal conditions is strongly encouraged in clinical practice guidelines.4-7
Exercise prescription is frequently used by allied health professionals with the aim of improving physiological well-being, functional ability, capacity, mobility and pain relief. 8,9 These allied healthcare professions include physiotherapy 10, chiropractic 10,11, occupational therapy12, and osteopathy.13 The type of exercise prescription provided typically includes: activity recommendations; progressive general exercise; more specific exercise interventions including stretching; range of motion activities and; stabilisation exercises to specific body regions.14
Osteopaths are primary contact health professionals who manage predominantly musculoskeletal complaints.15Orrock16 explored osteopathic practice in Australia in 2009 and found approximately 55% of practitioners often or always prescribe therapeutic exercise. In 2018, Adams, Sibbritt, Steel, Peng15 reported 74% of Australian osteopaths utilise exercise prescription, as do 78% of New Zealand osteopaths. Data from the United Kingdom (UK) shows approximately 23% of osteopaths used exercise prescription as part of their patient management.17 In contrast, a cross sectional study of Australian osteopaths in 2013, reported approximately 6% only of patient records examined in 2011 and 2012 contained a form of exercise prescription.18 Several case studies have also reported osteopaths prescribing exercise as a form of therapy.19-21 The use of exercise outside the immediate osteopathy practice environment has also been investigated with home exercise programmes featuring in various manual therapy research.22 This is limited higher quality research about the use of exercise prescription in osteopathy in the literature, suggesting further research is needed to effectively capture the use of exercise prescription in osteopathic practice. Our work presents a secondary data analysis of the Australian osteopathy practice-based research network 15,23 to profile the characteristics of osteopaths who use exercise prescription often in patient care.