 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 McKenzie 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 my recommendation 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 diagnosis and subgrouping patients based on their classification. What you look for is a directional preference so that's a 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 radiculopathy down to the foot it comes up to the calf or to the thigh or to the buttock or all the way up to the center of the back. Some of the other features is that it leans 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 but simply guiding them through movements that reduce their symptoms and giving them home exercises. In this way it builds 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 which could then go on to include a diploma they're broken into these different parts which go over one weekend 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 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 we're going to start putting it into use I'll give you my impressions at the end of the weekend we just got out for lunch so we're taking an hour break and today has been good we've got some hands on we spent the morning watching an assessment of a real-life patient a live demo of a volunteer patient who came in 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 those miracle patients one of the nice things about mackenzie is even if you don't get the patient well in the first visit you're still making progress you're still 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 mackenzie 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 a referral so it was good to see that it's not always heroic measures that that happen but you're always making progress and then we also started working on each other practicing these movements practicing these prone extensions and over pressure applying different forces all right it's day three of mackenzie part a course we've wrapped things up gone through the rest of the protocols or the the movements that we learn flexion side gliding adding rotation so these are the less common ways to treat patients or at least statistically 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 if you read Burton 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 result 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 mackenzie 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 the way that you know how while starting the assessment using this this method so i think it's great for students i think it's great for practicing doctors who have not been familiar with this and it just may change your mind okay thanks for taking the time to watch this video you might have been able to tell that uh some time has passed since i recorded that video i have a backlog of videos that have taken me years now just to finish editing so if you like that video if you found it interesting if you want to see more please leave me a comment hit that like button hit subscribe and that will tell me that yes people are watching this and i will continue to edit my backlog of videos and i will continue to make new videos such as the books that i read last year that i found interesting for chiropractors and the books that i'm planning on reading this year that i think would be interesting for chiropractors to read and my thoughts on current events in chiropractic and the state of continuing education in the profession so i have lots of ideas but i need to know that someone is paying attention so please hit that like button hit subscribe leave me a comment and tell me what you think we should be talking about in chiropractic in 2021 thanks again for watching i'll see you in the next one