Manual Therapy from a Pain Neuroscience Education Approach

Course overview

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.