I took Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT) - a.k.a. McKenzie Method - at the University of Western States in Portland, Oregon in April, 2017… and I'm finally getting around to editing this video!

MDT is one of a few techniques that I highly recommend for chiropractic students. The assessment and classification system complement your examination skills and encourage patient autonomy and self-reliance.

It can also be a great opportunity to interact with physical therapists (although, CE credits are only offered for chiropractors by the Chiropractic branch – and I've even heard stories of the institute not allowing chiropractors to take some PT seminars. sigh)

Learn more about the McKenzie Method at https://chiropractic.mckenzieinstitute.org

# Show Transcript I'm on the campus of the university of Western States where I'm taking a continuing education class put on by the McKenzie Institute USA. And this is part a, of Mackenzie for the lumbar spine. And I thought I'd do some videos as I take these continuing ed courses, giving a little overview of the course and Myrick. And whether you should take them.

McKenzie also known as mechanical diagnosis and therapy was developed by a New Zealand physiotherapist named Robin McKenzie. The treatment differs from a lot of chiropractic treatments in a number of ways, mainly in that it focuses heavily on assessment using mechanical. Uh, diagnosis and sub-grouping patients based on their classification, what you look for is a directional preference.

So that's his certain direction of movement, which reduces the symptoms, particularly a phenomenon known as centralization and centralization is when peripheral symptoms come closer to the center of the spine. And so if you've got radicular apathy down to the foot, it comes up to the calf or to the thigh or to the butt.

Uh, or all the way up to the center of the back. Uh, some of the other features is it liens heavily on patient education and self-treatment. And so for a lot of the time, the clinician is not providing any treatment to the patient patient, but simply guiding them through movies, mints that reduce their symptoms and giving them home exercises in this way.

It builds a self-reliance. And removes the dependence on the practitioner, which leads to greater outcomes in the end, the course is about 20 hours, but there are five different parts, parts, a through E, uh, which could then go on to include a diploma they're broken into these different parts, which go over one weekend and they're about 20 hours and they're five hours of online learning. And so you can learn the basics online before you take the course. There's some didactic portions of the lecture, and then there is a lot of hands-on. So today has just been the first day we've learned the basics tomorrow. We'll come back and we're going to start putting it to use. I'll give you my impressions at the end of the weekend. We just got out for lunch. So we're gonna take an hour break in today has been good. We've got some hands-on. Uh, we spent the morning watching an assessment of a real life patient, a live demo of a volunteer patient who came in, um, and saw some results. But what was kind of nice is that it wasn't a home run.

And so it wasn't just a clear cut. Miracle, which is important because I think a lot of times in these courses, they talk about the wins. They talk about those perfect patients, where everything went well, but you don't see what to do if it doesn't happen like the textbook, if it doesn't happen like this miracle patients, one of the nice things about McKenzie is even if you don't get the patient well in the first visit, you're still making progress.

You're still, uh, Assessing as you go and better able to classify where the patient goes, what subgroup. And sometimes that subgroup is something that you're not going to treat with the McKenzie method. It's going to be something where you either use your other tools as a chiropractor or a PT, or you send them out for referral. So it was good to see that it's not always a heroic measures that that happen. Um, But you're always making progress. And they also started working on each other, practicing these movements, practicing these prone, extensions, and over pressure, applying different forces.

all it's day three of McKenzie part a course we've wrapped things up, uh, gone through the rest of the protocols or the, uh, the movements that we learn, flection side gliding, adding rotation. So these are the less common ways to treat patients or at least typically less common. And so just some thoughts at the end of the course, I really like Mackenzie.

I think it can plug in to. Almost any practice style, but also gives you as a clinician, a way to think about a patient's pain. We talk a lot about clinical certainty and I don't think certainty is realistic. So if you read Burton, uh, certainty is a biological impossibility, but I do like talking about confidence.

So as a doctor, you should have confidence in what you're doing with a patient and knowing that even if right now, I'm not getting the results that I expect, that if I keep going down this path, I'm going to get an answer. So we may not know exactly the answer that we're going to get, but we know that we're going to come to one and that from that answer, we can make the next steps.

And I think that sums up pretty well. McKenzie. And, uh, how it can help you in your clinic. It's not hands-off we do use our hands. We do touch the patient. You can still adjust. You may not adjust, uh, say the lumbar, if it is a lumbar dysfunction, uh, but you still are going to treat the patient in the way that you know, how a while. Starting the assessment using this, this method. So I think it's great for your students. I think it's great for practicing doctors who have not been familiar with this, and it just may change.

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Check out my interview with instructor, Steven Heffner, DC