 I'm here with Dr. Steven Heffner, chiropractor and instructor for the chiropractic branch of the McKenzie Institute USA. What is the McKenzie method? The McKenzie method is a clinical assessment process where you take your patient through repeated movements or sustained positioning for a period of time and see what effects that it has on their symptoms. If we can find a movement or a direction that makes the pain decrease, remain better, or to centralize, which means it's going from a further place down the arm or leg to a closer place to the spine, then that is the exercise or the procedure that the patient does at home. It's a self-treatment program. So what kind of conditions can this address? Well, anything that has to do with the spine, we can go from low back pain, mid back pain, neck pain, headaches, arm pain, leg symptoms. We can even work with, we work with shoulders, problems. Any joint in the body, if it moves, we put it through different movements and directions and see if we can find something to make that thing move better and have less pain. There are over 300 name techniques in chiropractic. McKenzie is actually a physical therapy method originally, but compared to all these other different treatment techniques and methods, how does McKenzie compare? Okay. First thing, we don't use techniques like a certain adjustment of procedures. What we do that makes it unique is in the assessment, when we put the patient through movements, or if we do put our hands on them to try and see what direction they want to go in to see if they can make the symptoms better, we don't use the technique. It is an assessment process. So the unique thing is as we're assessing the patient, we're treating the patient. And then through that assessment, then they go home and they do whatever seems to make them better. They focus really heavily on assessing what the issue is before treating it or giving them care to take home. Yeah. And actually, the nice thing about this method, it can fit well with a lot of the other techniques that are done because through the assessment process, certain techniques, if they're a soft tissue technique or manipulation, which really is part of this, it works so well because we get them through a certain stage, we want to classify them to see if we can get rid of their pain, keep it away, and then we check the stability of the reduction of the pain. And in that checking the stability and then the prevention, you can add other techniques into it that can really work well if they do core strengthening or things like that. So at first glance, it does seem to be very hands off method. It does. At first glance, it does. And that's one of the misconceptions. There's a couple of misconceptions. One is that we never touch our patients. The second thing is that it's an extension program or a method. And although extension is used a lot because that's where a lot of the people get better with that direction, we have flexion, there's lateral movements, there's rotational movements are done through the assessment that we find out that they need. So there's that, excuse me, and also that we never touch our patients. And that's really, really a misnomer because we have clinician or doctor procedures that we go through when the self-treatment procedures are not giving you the information we want. Robin McKenzie always said that manipulation works great and he was a great manipulator, but he said not all people need to be manipulated. So that's where he started with the self-treatment portion. So unless you're married to the person, if you mobilize them or manipulate them, unless you're married to them and going home with them, you better show them something to do that they can do on their own. So if students or chiropractors are interested in McKenzie, what resources are there for them to get familiar and learn the technique, the method? What they can do is go to mckenzieinstituteinternational.org, or you can just Google McKenzie International and you'll come up and when you come to that website, up to the top there's branches. Click on branches and on the left side will be North America, and there's four of those and a chiropractic branch is underneath that one. The chiropractic branch is the only one of 30 branches that is not a country, it is an actual profession. So they go to the chiropractic branch and all of the courses are on there from all over the country. We're in basically right now where we're working out of five universities now that we're seeing the students and doctors all can come right on campus to have the courses. And if students are outside of the United States, can they take courses with physical therapists? Oh sure, like I said, there's 30 countries. And all they have to do is go to McKenzie International, click on branches, click on the country, and then they'll find whatever they want to find. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. You too. Thank you.