Manual Therapy from a Pain Neuroscience Education Approach

Course Description

With many therapists beginning to adopt a pain neuroscience education (PNE) treatment approach for patients with musculoskeletal pain, both critics and advocates often debate the role that manual therapy should play in pain treatment. Some see manual therapy as an intervention that hinders patient independence by creating a dependent reliance on the therapist and therefore should be avoided when using PNE. Conversely, some manual therapists argue that PNE is a simplistic intervention that tends to gloss over the specificity and skill that manual therapists use to improve patient outcomes. This course however will highlight research that shows that while both PNE and manual therapy are effective in their own right, that they are even more effective when used in conjunction with each other.

As PNE has grown in popularity, there has been a simultaneous shift in how researchers view the specific mechanisms through which manual therapy helps to decrease pain and improve ROM. Many well-known manual therapy researchers who utilize PNE now argue that manual therapy works not just at the tissue level but also at the brain level through cortical reorganization and neuroplasticity.

Are you a therapist that avoids manual therapy due to a self-perceived inability to palpate specific joint position faults? Or perhaps you are a manual therapist interested in learning more about pain neuroscience education and how it can be incorporated into your treatments. No matter which end of the spectrum you find yourself on, this course will help you to feel more confident in using both PNE and manual therapy for patients in pain. Specific manual therapy interventions and PNE metaphors will be highlighted that can easily be used the next day in the clinic.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, the participant will be able to:

• Describe the history of manual therapy conceptual models as well as current thought processes of manual therapy as an intervention for the brain in addition to tissue specific effects
• Summarize research on the inexact science of joint palpation as a basis for determining manual therapy intervention
• Develop a plan to educate patients using pain neuroscience metaphors while applying manual therapy
• Recognize the role of the patient expectations in delivering manual therapy and PNE
• Explain the importance of combining PNE with manual therapy and exercise and not simply performing PNE alone
• Utilize manual therapy and PNE in ways that promotes patient self-efficacy and independence

• Prerequisites

  None

• Educational Level

  Intermediate

• Other

  Satisfactory completion of this course will require the participant to respond to polling questions asked throughout the webinar & to be logged on during the entire webinar.