A critical review of manual therapy use for headache disorders: Prevalence, profiles, motivations, communication and self-reported effectiveness

© 2017 The Author(s). Background: Despite the expansion of conventional medical treatments for headache, many sufferers of common recurrent headache disorders seek help outside of medical settings. The aim of this paper is to evaluate research studies on the prevalence of patient use of manual therapies for the treatment of headache and the key factors associated with this patient population. Methods: This critical review of the peer-reviewed literature identified 35 papers reporting findings from new empirical research regarding the prevalence, profiles, motivations, communication and self-reported effectiveness of manual therapy use amongst those with headache disorders. Results: While available data was limited and studies had considerable methodological limitations, the use of manual therapy appears to be the most common non-medical treatment utilized for the management of common recurrent headaches. The most common reason for choosing this type of treatment was seeking pain relief. While a high percentage of these patients likely continue with concurrent medical care, around half may not be disclosing the use of this treatment to their medical doctor. Conclusions: There is a need for more rigorous public health and health services research in order to assess the role, safety, utilization and financial costs associated with manual therapy treatment for headache. Primary healthcare providers should be mindful of the use of this highly popular approach to headache management in order to help facilitate safe, effective and coordinated care

Unconditional preparation of nonclassical states via linear-and-quadratic optomechanics

Reservoir engineering enables the robust and unconditional preparation of pure quantum states in noisy environments. We show how a family of nonclassical states of a mechanical oscillator can be stabilized in a cavity that is parametrically coupled to both the mechanical displacement and the displacement squared. The cavity is driven with three tones, on the red sideband, on the cavity resonance, and on the second blue sideband. The states so stabilized are (squeezed and displaced) superpositions of a finite number of phonons. They show the unique feature of encompassing two prototypes of nonclassicality for bosonic systems: by adjusting the strength of the drives, one can in fact move from a single-phonon- to a Schrödinger-cat-like state. The scheme is deterministic, supersedes the need for measurement-and-feedback loops, and does not require initialization of the oscillator to the ground state

Reversible Optogenetic Control of Subcellular Protein Localization in a Live Vertebrate Embryo.

We demonstrate the utility of the phytochrome system to rapidly and reversibly recruit proteins to specific subcellular regions within specific cells in a living vertebrate embryo. Light-induced heterodimerization using the phytochrome system has previously been used as a powerful tool to dissect signaling pathways for single cells in culture but has not previously been used to reversibly manipulate the precise subcellular location of proteins in multicellular organisms. Here we report the experimental conditions necessary to use this system to manipulate proteins in vivo. As proof of principle, we demonstrate that we can manipulate the localization of the apical polarity protein Pard3 with high temporal and spatial precision in both the neural tube and the embryo's enveloping layer epithelium. Our optimizations of optogenetic component expression and chromophore purification and delivery should significantly lower the barrier for establishing this powerful optogenetic system in other multicellular organisms

From Quantum Query Complexity to State Complexity

State complexity of quantum finite automata is one of the interesting topics in studying the power of quantum finite automata. It is therefore of importance to develop general methods how to show state succinctness results for quantum finite automata. One such method is presented and demonstrated in this paper. In particular, we show that state succinctness results can be derived out of query complexity results.Comment: Some typos in references were fixed. To appear in Gruska Festschrift (2014). Comments are welcome. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1402.7254, arXiv:1309.773

A first attempt at ordinal projective measurement

To our knowledge, all applications of the quantum framework in social sciences are used to model measurements done on a discrete nominal scale. However, especially in cognition, experiments often produce data on an ordinal scale, which implies some internal structure between the possible outcomes. Since there are no ordinal scales in physics, orthodox projection-valued measurement (PVM) lacks the tools and methods to deal with these ordinal scales. Here, we sketch out an attempt to incorporate the ordinal structure of outcomes into the subspaces representing these outcomes. This will also allow us to reduce the dimensionality of the resulting Hilbert spaces, as these often become too high in more complex quantum-like models. To do so, we loosen restrictions placed upon the PVM (and even POVM) framework. We discuss the two major consequences of this generalization: scaling and the loss of repeatability. We also present two applications of this approach, one in game theory and one concerning Likert scales

Quantum Models for Psychological Measurements: An Unsolved Problem

There has been a strong recent interest in applying quantum theory (QT) outside physics, including in cognitive science. We analyze the applicability of QT to two basic properties in opinion polling. The first property (response replicability) is that, for a large class of questions, a response to a given question is expected to be repeated if the question is posed again, irrespective of whether another question is asked and answered in between. The second property (question order effect) is that the response probabilities frequently depend on the order in which the questions are asked. Whenever these two properties occur together, it poses a problem for QT. The conventional QT with Hermitian operators can handle response replicability, but only in the way incompatible with the question order effect. In the generalization of QT known as theory of positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs), in order to account for response replicability, the POVMs involved must be conventional operators. Although these problems are not unique to QT and also challenge conventional cognitive theories, they stand out as important unresolved problems for the application of QT to cognition. Either some new principles are needed to determine the bounds of applicability of QT to cognition, or quantum formalisms more general than POVMs are needed

Focused Deterrence and the Prevention of Violent Gun Injuries: Practice, Theoretical Principles, and Scientific Evidence

Focused deterrence strategies are a relatively new addition to a growing portfolio of evidence-based violent gun injury prevention practices available to policy makers and practitioners. These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying violence-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring violent gun injury problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions. Consistent with documented public health practice, the focused deterrence approach identifies underlying risk factors and causes of recurring violent gun injury problems, develops tailored responses to these underlying conditions, and measures the impact of implemented interventions. This article reviews the practice, theoretical principles, and evaluation evidence on focused deterrence strategies. Although more rigorous randomized studies are needed, the available empirical evidence suggests that these strategies generate noteworthy gun violence reduction impacts and should be part of a broader portfolio of violence prevention strategies available to policy makers and practitioners