[Geographical distribution of judo therapist facilities and orthopedic facilities]

Judo therapy originally developed from manual treatment of bone and joint injury by judo athletes and nowadays has become a popular alternative and complementary medicine in the area of orthopedic care. The purpose of the present study was to assess the relationships of judo therapists and orthopedic physicians as health service providers by comparing geographical distributions of their two types of facilities.

A cross-sectional study.

The numbers of judo therapist facilities and orthopedic facilities per 100,000 population in each municipality were obtained through web yellow pages and from Japanese census data. In order to investigate the geographical distributions of these facilities according to cities, towns and villages, Lorenz curves were drawn and Gini indices were calculated.

Judo therapist facilities were more ubiquitously located than orthopedic facilities: the median number of judo therapist facilities per 100,000 population in all municipalities (n = 1949) was 14.9 (25-75 percentile: 8.6-21.8) and that of orthopedic facilities was 2.8 (0-51.9). The number of municipalities without judo therapist facilities was 322 while that for those without orthopedic facilities was 822. There were 231 municipalities without orthopedic facilities but with judo therapist facilities, while there were only 18 municipalities without judo therapist facilities but with orthopedic facilities. The overall Gini indices ofjudo therapist facilities and orthopedic facilities were 0.264 and 0.276, respectively. When the differences in Gini indices between judo therapist facilities and orthopedic facilities were separately compared in cities, towns and villages, those in cities were 0.247 and 0.232, respectively, while those in towns and villages were 0.403 and 0.632, respectively.

Comparing the geographical distribution of the two types of health care facilities, orthopedic facilities were found to be more frequently located in cities than in towns and villages whereas judo therapist facilities appeared to be more homogeneously located. It is suggested that judo therapist facilities may thus fill some of the need for orthopedic care, especially in rural areas.