Can back pain caused by symptom-giving sacroiliac joint relaxation ...

5. Discussion and assessment of the results
5.1. Discussion of the methodology
Within-subject design
Pregnancy has a defined time frame and brings about certain physiological and
pathophysiological changes which the body reacts to with numerous compensatory
mechanisms. In the course of pregnancy these changes increase constantly; after
having given birth, however, the body changes back to its original state. [2, 17, 27,
29, 45] When the body does not manage to compensate sufficiently for the
increasing physiological changes, pathologies arise. And, since the physiological
changes continue to increase during pregnancy, it can be assumed that the
pathology does not go back to normal without intervention. This situation provides the
physiological basis for the possibility to use the test persons as their own control
group in this study. [45] Since I compared a control period (RW) with various
experimenting periods (PT1W-PT3W), this study applied the “within-subject design“.
Following the measuring of the results during the various observation periods, a
mean value was calculated.
Participant number
In order to achieve scientific acknowledgement a certain number of test persons is
necessary. Unfortunately, my study included a relatively low number of participants
(14), which is due to the fact that, at my practice, I was not able to find and treat a
greater number of test persons within the limited period of six months. More time
would have been necessary to do so. However, the low number, which was mainly
due to the limited selection criteria, also had an advantage: it improved the
homogeneity of the sample.
Master’s Thesis Wolfgang Aspalter 62