EFFICACY OF ERGONOMICS AND ISOMETRICS WITH STRETCHING IN TREATMENT OF MECHANICAL NECK PAIN

Abstract

Background: Neck pain is one of the most common musculoskeletal disorders in the general population. Point prevalence ranges from 6% to 22% and up to 38% of elderly population. Now days there is increasing demand of computer, industrial and physical workloads so poor ergonomics work design and certain psychosocial factors plays major role in development of mechanical neck pain. Such disorders have long been dealt as pain syndromes and first line of intervention used to be the medical treatment. But in past decades, due to advance researches and evidence, role of physiotherapy especially those of therapeutic exercise and ergonomics guidelines proved to be very helpful. Objective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of ergonomics and isometrics with stretching in treatment of mechanical neck pain. Methodology: RCT was conducted at Shalamar hospital Lahore. 50 patients were recruited in the study and divided into two groups with 25 patients in each group. Group A received therapeutic ultrasound along Ergonomics and Group B received therapeutic ultrasound along cervical isometrics and cervical stretches. Patient included in both groups have age between 20 and 40 years. Neck Disability Index (NDI) was used in this study. Results: Paired sample t-test was used within groups for analysis and independent t-test was used in intra-comparison of treatments. (p< 0.05). Statistically significant improvement is found in both groups. Conclusion: The result shows both the treatment techniques, muscle energy technique and static stretching were effective in alleviating the non-specific neck pain in terms of decreasing pain intensity and increasing active cervical range of motion as there was no significant difference between the two groups, however MET was superior than static stretching in decreasing pain intensity and increasing active cervical range of motion.