The South African Journal of Physiotherapy is the official scholarly refereed journal of the South African Society of Physiotherapy. It aims to publish original research and facilitate continuing professional development for physiotherapists and other health professions both nationally and internationally.

Background: This study aimed to (a) determine how frequently chiropractors use postural assessment when treating patients with back or neck pain, (b) determine the rationale for the use of postural assessment by chiropractors, (c) examine the assessment methods employed, (d) explore which specific aspects of posture are assessed and (e) determine the types of back and neck conditions being treated. Methods: An 11-item online questionnaire was developed. A link to this survey was distributed using SurveyMonkey to the entire membership of the Royal College of Chiropractors. Results: There were 272 respondents to the survey. Of the respondents, 79% ‘almost always’ used postural assessment when treating patients with back or neck pain. Respondents reported using postural assessment to help determine whether a patient was making progress (61.8%), provide an outcome measure (57.1%) and help inform the diagnosis (89.2%) and treatment plan (81.8%); almost all respondents (98.1%) reported carrying out a postural assessment visually, with no aids. Most respondents reported assessing their patients posteriorly, anteriorly and from both left and right sides, observing 44 specific anatomical items. The conditions treated included sacroiliac pain (96.7%), stiff neck (95.6%), non-specific lowback pain (92.6%), lumbar disc herniation (91.5%), cervical arthritis (89.7%), lumbar strain (87.1%), lumbar arthritis (86.4%), thoracic pain (86.4%), neck strain (84.9%) and whiplash (79.8%). Conclusions: The findings suggest that the unaided visual assessment of posture using a large range of anatomical points is used by UK chiropractors for the purposes of aiding diagnosis and treatment of patients with back and neck pathologies.

Background: This study aimed to (a) determine how frequently chiropractors are using postural assessment when treating patients with back or neck pain, (b) determine the rationale for the use of postural assessment by chiropractors, (c) examine the assess-ment methods employed, (d) explore which specific aspects of posture are assessed and (e) determine the types of back and neck conditions being treated. Methods: An 11-item online questionnaire was developed. A link to this survey was distributed using Sur-veyMonkey to the entire membership of the Royal College of Chiropractors. Results: There were 272 respondents to the survey. Of the respondents, 79% ‘almost always’ used postural assessment when treating patients with back or neck pain. Respondents reported using postural assessment to help determine whether a patient was making progress (61.8%), provide an outcome measure (57.1%) and help inform the diagnosis (89.2%) and treatment plan (81.8%); almost all respondents (98.1%) reported carrying out a postural assessment visually, with no aids. Most respondents reported assessing their patient posteriorly, anteriorly and from both left and right sides, observing 44 specific anatomical items. The conditions treated included sacroiliac pain (96.7%), stiff neck (95.6%), non-specific low-back pain (92.6%), lumbar disc herniation (91.5%), cer-vical arthritis (89.7%), lumbar strain (87.1%), lumbar arthritis (86.4%), thoracic pain (86.4%), neck strain (84.9%) and whiplash (79.8%). Conclusions: The findings suggest that the unaided visual assessment of posture using a large range of anatomical points is used by UK chiropractors for the purposes of aiding diagnosis and treatment of patients with back and neck pathologies.

Large-scale password data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace, which has enabled researchers to produce a substantial body of password security research utilising real-world password datasets, which often contain numbers of records in the tens or even hundreds of millions. While much study has been conducted on how password composition policies (sets of rules that a user must abide by when creating a password) influence the distribution of user-chosen passwords on a system, much less research has been done on inferring the password composition policy that a given set of user-chosen passwords was created under. In this paper, we state the problem with the naive approach to this challenge, and suggest a simple approach that produces more reliable results. We also present pol-infer, a tool that implements this approach, and demonstrates its use in inferring password composition policies.