Effectiveness of Jingjin Therapy for Non-Specific Chronic Neck Pain with Extension Dysfunction: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Gong Z, Gao Y, Liu W, Li W, Wu X, Li J · Journal of Pain Research · 2025 May

Objective

To investigate whether Jingjin therapy, compared with general manual therapy, accelerates improvement in neck extension dysfunction among patients with non-specific chronic neck pain.

Conclusions

Jingjin therapy significantly improved neck extension function in patients with non-specific chronic neck pain, with no significant difference compared with general manual therapy.

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Insights

Jingjin therapy improved neck extension in chronic non-specific neck pain, but offered no meaningful advantage over general manual therapy.

This single-centre randomised controlled trial enrolled Chinese adults with chronic non-specific neck pain and impaired active neck extension. Participants were assigned to receive either Jingjin therapy, a distal manual intervention, or general manual therapy across six sessions delivered over nine days. Active neck extension was assessed before treatment, after the final session, and one week later, with repeated-measures mixed-effects modelling used to compare changes between groups over time. Both treatment approaches substantially improved active neck extension from baseline to the end of treatment. However, improvement was essentially equivalent between the Jingjin therapy and general manual therapy groups, indicating that Jingjin therapy was effective but not superior to conventional manual treatment for restoring neck extension function.