COM/CEN faculty member Geoff Bove publishes innovative preclinical paper on manipulative techniques for reducing peritoneal adhesions

Geoffrey Bove, DC, PhD, in collaboration with Susan Chapelle, RMT, of Squamish BC, Canada, recently published a paper entitled “Visceral Mobilization Can Lyse and Prevent Peritoneal Adhesions in a Rat Model”. The research appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapy. Peritoneal adhesions can occur following surgery or trauma and can contribute to pain and other dysfunction following these insults. The possibility that these adhesions can be prevented or reduced through manual therapy has significant implications for the surgical and post-operative pain management fields, both in terms of reducing morbidity and health care costs. Interest in this approach dates back to clinical case studies on manipulative medicine and visceral adhesions in the 1930s. Bove and Chapelle used their clinical backgrounds to back-translate into an animal model that was more amenable to quantifying the adhesions and performing histological analysis following their manual techniques. They are also working on clinical trial designs to test outcome measures in patients recovering from breast surgery. The abstract of the paper, in press, can be seen

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