Management of headache disorders: design of a randomised clinical trial screening for prognostic patient characteristics.

Background: Treatment of headache disorders is not always optimal. Patients are treated in multiple ways, and the lack of scientific arguments for referral and the insufficient implementation of guidelines result in unclear treatment strategies. The coexistence of headache and neck pain can lead to the referral to a musculoskeletal physiotherapist.

The clinical examination of neck pain patients: the validity of a group of tests.

We evaluated whether a blinded observer could identify the neck pain patients in a sample of 42 subjects consisting of neck pain patients and asymptomatic controls.The allocation of subjects to either the control or patient group was based on the scoring of a VAS scale for pain intensity, a Bournemouth Questionnaire (BQ), a manual examination of the rotation of C0-2-7 (rated for Range Of Motion, end feel, onset of pain), an adapted Spurling test and Cervical Range Of Motion (CROM) measurements.The VAS and BQ resulted in a high % of correct allocations (>/= 77.