[Posturology. Methodological problems and scientific evidence]

In the last years, the word "posturology" has been used in complementary medicine to define the discipline studying the relation between posture and many pathologies, above all chronic pain. Posturology is more and more frequently recommended as a diagnostic-therapeutic system for treatment of chronic complaints, on the base of which different health caregivers (physicians and not) treat the same clinical problem, with very different methodological patterns and therapies. If it is true that many scientific papers highlight a relation between body posture and muscoloskeletal disorders; nevertheless on the base of scientific literature, it is not possible to demonstrate any scientific principle showing that the correction of small alterations of posture on the base of a stabilometric analysis can improve muscoloskeletal pain or other diseases. Rather, it is true the opposite. Today a positive stabilometric test can be referred only to an alteration of the vestibulo-spinal system.