Professional practice guidelines nevertheless recommend that a course of non-surgical care, including CAM treatment, be tried prior to surgery, although rigorous research evaluating conservative and CAM treatments of carpal tunnel syndrome is not available. The purpose of this research will be to investigate and report clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of three understudied treatments for carpal tunnel syndrome. The research will continue the close collaboration of medical and alternative medicine researchers based at the Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation with chiropractic researchers based at Northwestern Health Sciences University. Baseline measures are taken at two visits that also are used to determine eligibility. The treatment period lasts for five weeks with the number of treatments per week determined in part by the specific treatment's protocol, and in part by participant responsiveness to treatment.
Primary endpoints are self-reported symptom severity and functional status.
In this study CMC is the control, rather than placebo or sham. We considered placebo or sham as a control but did not adopt that design for two reasons. First, we were concerned about the ethical problems of giving placebo to individuals with moderate to severe symptoms. In such instances, standard medical care provides a suitable control, and additionally permits us to draw public health conclusions relevant to community care. Secondly, had we provided a placebo or sham control for each CAM treatment, the study would be more complicated and require a much larger sample size.