Fortin Finger Test for the SI Joint

Описание: The Fortin Finger Test came from a paper in 1997 (Fortin JD, Falco FJ. The Fortin finger test: an indicator of sacroiliac pain. American journal of orthopedics (Belle Mead, NJ). 1997 Jul 1;26(7):477-80) by Dr. Joseph Fortin. This original paper was looking at a way to diagnose sacroiliac joint dysfunction from low back pain and they used injections into the SI joint to confirm patients with SI joint dysfunction. He did reference this test in 1993 in a paper on diagnosing SI joint dysfunction (Forst, S. L., Wheeler, M., Fortin, J. D., & Vilensky, J. A. (2006). The sacroiliac joint: anatomy, physiology and clinical significance. Pain physician, 9(1), 61.).

How to perform it
-Have the patient standing with their feet shoulder width apart
-Ask the patient to use 1 finger to point to the location of their pain (take note of this location)
-After 5-10 minutes, ask them to point to the area of their pain again
If they point to the same or within 1 cm of the same area, it’s positive

There are not any easily found articles on the reliability, sensitivity, or specificity of this test. One study was using it along with injections to see if the SI joint and/or Facet joint were a source of pain. The authors did find that it could be used to determine pain in the SI or facet joints but it was not very diagnostically accurate. (Chou S-H, Lu C-C, Lin S-Y, Shen P-C, Liu Z-M, Chih W-H, Shih C-L. A New Strategy for Rapid Diagnosis of the Source of Low Back Pain in Patients Scheduled to Undergo Treatment with Cooled Radiofrequency Ablation. Diagnostics. 2021; 11(10):1822.)

It looks like it is more often utilized as an additional assessment tool when assessing someone. It’s very quick to do and seems to be best utilized with additional tests, examination and history taking.

What do you think? Do you use it? Think we need to use it more? Maybe more research into it? Let me know in the comments.



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