Back pain is a problem that affects millions of people around the world, so it should come as no surprise that some of healthcare’s most brilliant minds have dedicated their careers to learning about the best ways to prevent and treat spinal issues. One of those minds was Robin McKenzie, a physiotherapist in New Zealand who developed a method for identifying and addressing a wide variety of back problems. The program is aptly called the McKenzie Method, and in today’s blog, we take a closer look at why it has become a popular program for physical therapists looking to help clients overcome a range of back issues.
Understanding The McKenzie Method
The McKenzie method can be helpful for identifying and treating a host of spinal issues, including:
- Joint pain
- Vertebral issues
- Disc pain
- Nerve problems
- Muscle/Tendon/Ligament disorders
The McKenzie method has four unique stages that you and your PT will progress through as you work to recover from your spinal ailment. Those four stages are:
- Assessment – The assessment portion really seeks to understand exactly what is causing your discomfort. It typically begins with a review of your medical history and a conversation with the patient about what symptoms they’re experiencing and which actions make symptoms alleviate or worsen. From there, a number of movement exercises will be performed in order to give your doctor or physical therapist more information about how certain stress patterns affect different areas of your body. Seeing the body in motion is key to the assessment portion, and it can even help to prevent the need for costlier diagnostic tests like imaging exams.
- Classification – The classification stage involves the development of an active treatment plan tailored to your unique strengths and deficits. We’ll talk with you about your injuries, your short-term and long-term goals, and what we expect your recovery timeline will look like. We’ll also go over the types of motion-centered exercises and stretches that we want you to perform in our clinic and at home between sessions. Here we are classifying your injury and developing a personalized recovery program that is rooted in movement, strength training and posture improvement.
- Treatment – The next stage in the McKenzie method is where you’ll spend the bulk of your time, and that’s the treatment phase. We’ve identified the problem, we’ve developed a plan for attacking it, and now it is time to put in the work. Because the method focuses on active interventions and movement-based exercises, many patients can make great strides on their own by regularly performing their individualized program. The goal is to give the patient the tools they need to overcome their condition with minimal return visits to the clinic, which in turn bleeds into the last stage.
- Prevention – Normally prevention would come before anything else, but in these cases you are now working to prevent the injury from returning once it has been effectively treated. Educating the patient on why their condition developed in the first place, and how to self-treat at the first signs of return discomfort can help prevent the issue from ever becoming as severe as it did in the first place. If you just go back to doing all the same things you did that led to back pain in the first place, there’s no reason to expect spine problems to stay away. We want to help you understand why back pain developed and give you the tools to self-manage it down the road.
To learn more about the Mckenzie method or other methods of treatments we offer at OrthoRehab Specialists, give our team a call today at (612) 339-2041.
PT of Costa Rican National Soccer Team for 2007 World Cup in Victoria, CAN. Clinical Instructor for University of Minnesota Doctor of Physical Therapy Affiliations
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