Starting this Summer, researchers at the London College of Osteopathic Medicine in Marylebone, NW1, will carry out a trial of a manipulative treatment for RLS. This follows up on promising work a few years ago when twenty people, recruited through this web-site, were treated by the method and most reported a significant improvement which continued for long after the manipulation course ceased, some being able to give up the drugs they had been taking. Such results are usually suspected to be caused by the so-called placebo effect – after all everybody hopes to get better – so it is important that follow-up investigations test the treatment’s effectiveness in a randomised controlled trial [RCT] where subjects are divided into two groups by chance; both receiving a general manipulative treatment but only one group getting the specific manipulations we are assessing. We will arrange the treatments so that the subjects are unlikely to know which group they are in and consequently any difference between the groups’ progress will not be due to the placebo effect.

The London College of Osteopathic Medicine, www.lcom.org.uk , has a sixty year history of training medical doctors to be osteopaths and significant research experience. As there is no similar training elsewhere in the world, to date doctors from eighteen countries have come to learn with us. Any treatment given in the trial will be by a medical doctor who is also an osteopath.