INTERTESTER RELIABILITY OF THE CYRIAX EVALUATION IN ASSESSING PATIENTS WITH SHOULDER PAIN

lames Cyriax's approach to diagnosis and treatment of soft tissue diso rders is frequently used by orthopaedic and sport physical therapists. The reliability of using Cyriax's system to determine diagnostic cate gories, however, has not been established. The purpose of this study w as to examine the intertherapist reliability of assessments made using Cyriax's shoulder evaluation. Twenty-one cases of painful shoulder we re evaluated independently by two experienced physical therapists. The rapists used a checklist to indicate their assessment of each case by selecting a specific shoulder lesion or by indicating that the case di d not fit the Cyriax model, Cohen's kappa statistic was used to measur e intertherapist agreement. Therapists classified 19 of the 21 cases i nto the same diagnostic category for a percent agreement of 90.5%. The kappa value was .875, indicating ''almost perfect'' agreement. Both t herapists classified the same four cases of painful shoulder as not fi tting the Cyriax model of soft tissue examination. The results of this study show that the Cyriax evaluation can be a highly reliable schema for assessing patients with shoulder pain.