MANUAL VS. MECHANICAL CHEST PERCUSSION: CRITIQUES OF THREE RESEARCH ARTICLES
Three articles are critiqued, each of which reported research findings related to a comparison of manual and mechanical techniques for chest percussion in hospitalized patients suffering from cystic fibrosis. The three articles span a wide range of publication years·1979 through 194; therefore, one would anticipate some advances in the research findings as one progresses through the articles. Because of the 15-year time span covered by the research presented in the articles, the initial review of the articles is presented in chronological order of the publication data of the three articles.
Maxwell and Redmond (1979) reported on the testing of a mechanical device that allowed a cystic fibrosis patient to perform her or his own chest physiotherapy, as opposed to a manual performance of the chest percussion by a health care professional. The mechanical device tested was the Equi-Med percussor that operated at 230 volts and produced 200-to-3,200 strokes per minute using a 10-speed selector switch.
A total of 14 patients were studied by Maxwell and Redmond (1979). The age of the subjects ranged from seven years old to 21 years old. At the time of the testing, all of the subjects were in clinical remission from their cystic fibrosis. Of the 14 subjects, "11 were normally sputum producers and 3 produced sutim only when they had exacerbations of chest infection" (Maxwell & Redmond, 1979, p. 542). The relative effectiveness of the mechanical device in relation to manual chest percussion was based on measured sputum volumes produced by each method.
For the test, patients were treated on one day with the mechanical device and on the following day with manual chest percussion. All patients received identical treatments on any given day during the test. The test results found that the youngest of the subjects who could use the mechanical devic...