| Objective: To determine if 2 practitioners of differing skill levels could reliably agree on the presence of a weak or strong muscle tested on a predetermined set of 6 proximal leg muscles when all visual, verbal and non verbal cues were removed from view of the assessing practitioners. Study Design: A reliability study. Main Outcome Measures: Percentage correct responses from both practitioners represented as a Kappa score. Results: This project involved two groups of patients, 28 with lower back pain (LBP) and 56 with no LBP. Two examiners (named Ex1 and Ex2 in this report) tested various muscles independently on the two groups, assigning each as either weak (W) or strong (S). The Hamstring muscle group had an agreement of 69.6%; Gluteus Maximus had 75.6%; Gluteus Medius 77.5%; Psoas 83.9%; Tensor Fascia Lata (TFL) 76.8%; and Rectus Femoris had an agreement of 90.5%. Conclusions: Manual muscle testing showed fair to substantial agreement between examiners however more research is needed to determine the validity of its use in the detection of low back pain. This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher; full text by subscription.
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