BU Research Blog

Congratulations to HSC postgraduate student Joyce Miller who has just completed her PhD by Publication.  Joyce Miller is a chiropractic practitioner and lecturer with over 25 years private practice experience. She is Associate Professor at Anglo-European Chiropractic College in Bournemouth.  Her thesis Effects of Musculoskeletal Dysfunction in Excessive Crying Syndromes of Infancy presents research spanning more than a decade.  Joyce studied the relevance of chiropractic manual therapy to excessive crying in infancy through a unique series of eight clinical academic papers.

The eight separate studies used a range of different research methods:

1. a demographic survey of paediatric patients attending a chiropractic clinic;
2. a record study to determine the prevalence of side effects or adverse events;
3. a cohort study to substantiate sub-groups of excessively crying infants;
4. a prospective observational study to develop a predictive model using likelihood ratios to forecast the presence of infant colic in a clinical population;
5. validation of a one-page instrument to assess clinical outcomes against the gold standard crying diary;
6. a randomised comparison trial of two types of chiropractic manual therapy for infant colic;
7. a randomised controlled single blind trial to determine efficacy of blinding as well as chiropractic manual therapy in management of infant colic;
8. a case-control study to investigate  long-term effects of chiropractic manual therapy into toddlerhood.

Well done!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

HSC