SPINE-WORK: An inclusive research community to study and improve force-based manipulations for spine pain

Low back and neck pain, which impose major impediments to quality of life and are responsible for significant productivity loss, are often treated with expensive, sometimes ineffective, and potentially addictive drugs. Complementary therapies, especially force-based manipulations (FBMs), have the potential to address these challenges but remain poorly understood especially for spine pain. The highly multifaceted nature of FBMs complicates a complete understanding of the physiologic mechanisms involved with pain relief, requiring the integrative synthesis of neuroscience, physics, engineering, physiology, and clinical fields. To address this need, we will create a network - SPINEWORK - of researchers from all disciplines interested in exploring the potential role of FBMs in alleviating spine pain. The network will provide members with the opportunity to identify new collaborators, to learn about other disciplines, to disseminate ideas and information to their colleagues and the larger community, and to foster better interdisciplinary communication. SPINEWORK will support the network of researchers and activities administered by a set of Committees and will be organized into intersecting and evolving Working Groups, each made up of members from multiple institutions and traditional disciplines and focused on specific areas, such as Imaging or Animal Models. The Working Groups will promote interdisciplinary research through physical and virtual gatherings, white papers, journal special issues, and video content. A special Working Group on Terminology will focus on defining a common lexicon for spine pain and forced-based manipulations; this task is essential because even simple terms can have very different meaning to different communities, leading to confusion and impeding progress for collaborative teams. SPINEWORK will sponsor a pilot and facilitation grant program for interdisciplinary collaborative teams formed by its members. The grants will be focused on opportunities to seed or boost R01 proposals, activities that build intellectual infrastructure (e.g., think tanks or workshops), and opportunities for scientists from one discipline immerse in disciplines outside their core area. Annually, SPINEWORK will bring its members together for a Summit meeting to assess its activities, report findings, spawn new Working Groups, review progress, and plan for the coming year. Overall, SPINEWORK's mission is to lay the intellectual groundwork for improved treatment of low back and neck pain via FBMs by creating and fostering a multidisciplinary, scientifically and culturally diverse network of researchers from across the spectrum of approaches to understand FBMs and spine pain.