Results
The four participants completed all three phases of the study. Participant 2 missed one treatment and 1 week at follow-up due to work commitments and Participant 3 missed a treatment due to holiday leave; no data were collected for these participants during the missing weeks.
From the initial interviews, it was apparent that all four participants said that they had experienced levels of stress which they believed to be having a direct negative effect on their physical and psychological well-being. When asked what aspects of work increased their stress levels, comments included ‘unrealistic timeframes, deadlines, workload and dealing with people’. The participants reported that increased stress levels caused them to feel frustrated and out of control, and led to poor memory and irritability; all of which affected their performance at work. All four stated that they experienced fatigue and sleep problems and three of them experienced musculoskeletal disorders. Only Participant 1 had taken days off work (2 days) as a consequence of these symptoms in the last year. Participant 3 was taking medication and was the only one to have used complementary therapies before.
Figure 1 shows the scores for each participant on the GHQ-12. Participants 1, 3 and 4 reported improved psychological well-being from baseline to intervention. The small improvement shown by Participant 4 returned to baseline at follow-up and Participant 3 showed a similar trend. It was evident that Participant 2 reported deterioration after the initial 2 weeks of reflexology treatments. Two further observations are notable: first, all four participants reported relatively high levels of psychological well-being at all three data collection points (given that the distribution of scores on the GHQ using the Likert scoring ranged from 0 to 36); second, the participants with the lowest psychological well-being at baseline (Participant 1 and 3) showed the greatest improvements at intervention.
A variation in main symptoms was reported across all four participants in the MYMOP2 at week 1. All participants stated they were not taking medication for their main symptom (i.e. Symptom 1 on the MYMOP2 scale). Participants 1 and 2 had been experiencing their main symptom for 3 months to 1 year, whereas, Participants 3 and 4 had been experiencing their main symptom for 1–5 years. Participants 1, 3 and 4 felt avoiding medication for their problem was ‘very important’ but Participant 2 felt this was ‘not applicable’. The mean scores shown in Figure 2 were calculated using the mean of all nominated scales for each participant at all four data collection points.21 The first two columns for each participant represent measures taken before the intervention: note missing data for Participant 2 at the start of the intervention. Participants 1, 2 and 3 reported a steady improvement in symptoms that were most bothersome at baseline and this was maintained at follow-up. Scores for Participant 4 increased on the second measure before the intervention and showed some improvement at follow-up