Geographical distribution of judo therapists and orthopedists in Japan

Judo therapy is a unique and long-established Japanese comedical profession, specialized in manually treating fractures and sprains in practitioners' offices. Having the overlapped scopes of services between judo therapists and orthopedists, disputes between the 2 have gradually emerged recently.

To examine the relationship between judo therapists and orthopedists by comparing their geographic distributions at the whole country level and at prefecture level.

Cross-sectional study.

The numbers of judo therapist facilities and orthopedists per 100,000 population in each municipality were obtained through web yellow pages and from the Japanese census data. Lorenz curves and Gini indices were calculated to show the distributions and to compare the numbers of judo therapist facilities and orthopedists per 100,000 population.

The median number of judo therapist facilities per 100,000 population in all municipalities was 12.0 (range 0-135) and that for orthopedists was 4.3 (0-186). The Gini indices of the nationwide judo therapist facilities and those for orthopedists were 0.29 and 0.36, respectively.

These data show the relatively homogeneous distribution of judo therapist facilities compared with orthopedists. In smaller municipalities, judo therapist facilities may fill in the absence of orthopedists. As for lager municipalities, further study is needed to examine whether the relationships between them are competitive or complementary.