Manage Your Own Pain with the McKenzie Method
Do you want to gain more control over your life and over your constant neck or low back pain?
About 80% of people with neck and low back pain can manage their own pain without anybody even touching them. The trick is to find what direction your spine needs to move and with what amount of force it needs to move.
How do I know what direction I should move?
Our therapists at Color Country Physical Therapy (CCPT) are trained in what’s called the McKenzie Method of Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT). They have spent years striving to understand the mechanics of the spine and how to safely move patients through specific movements and forces to resolve neck and low back pain.
When you come to one of our clinics for an evaluation, one of our therapists will ask you a series of questions to better understand your symptoms and the series of events that resulted in your neck or low back pain. With this personalized understanding, they will lead you through a series of movements to safely find the right direction and force to reduce and eventually resolve your pain. Once the relieving direction and force is found, then comes the homework…
Homework:
- Perform the relieving activity at least every two hours while awake.
- Avoid positions and activities that increase your pain.
The key to making lasting changes in the tissues of your spine is frequency. We will ask you to perform the relieving activity at least every two hours while you’re awake. This can be exhausting, and can result in some temporary new aches and pains, but this is what needs to be done to have lasting relief of your pain. Fortunately, we will only ask you to do this for around two to four weeks depending on the severity of your symptoms and how long it has been since the time you started having pain.
So what does a general treatment plan for the spine look like at CCPT?
- Eliminate Pain
- Maintain Correction
- Recover Function
- Teach Long-Term Prevention
In order for the spine to really be stable in these new, healthy positions, the muscles that attach to the spine need to be strong. We will progressively lead you through exercises to improve the stability of your spine as your spine can tolerate more forces. Our goal is to get you back to the activities that you love doing, and that training best happens in the clinic.
When you leave our clinic on your last day of therapy, we hope to never see you back with the same pain that brought you in initially. We ensure that your spine has had the appropriate amount of time to heal, you have built up a good muscular support for your spine, and you know how to prevent your pain from returning in the future. We also train you to know how to treat your pain on your own if it should return in the future.
Our treatment plan is designed to set you up for a future without pain in your neck and low back.
