How does the McKenzie Method work?

There are three parts to the process: assessment, treatment and prevention. 

Assessment

• It involves a detailed history about your symptoms and how they behave.
• You will be asked to perform certain movements and rest in certain positions to help reveal a pattern to the symptom behaviour.
• The main difference to regular physiotherapy assessment is the use of repeated movements rather than a single repetition.

How your symptoms and range of movement changes with these repeated movements provides your therapist with information that they can use to identify and categorise your problem.

Treatment

• According to the findings of the assessment, we will be able to prescribe specific exercises and advice regarding postures to use and others to avoid.
• We can provide advanced hands-on techniques until you can self-manage.
• The aim is to be as effective as possible in the least number of exercises sessions.
• Treatment that you can perform five or six times a day is more likely to be effective in a shorter period of time than treatment which is provided by the therapist once or twice per week.
• The emphasis is on you, the patient, being actively involved. This can minimise the number of visits to the clinic.

Ultimately, most patients can successfully treat themselves when provided with the necessary knowledge and tools.

Prevention

• By learning how to self-treat the current problem, you gain hands-on knowledge on how to minimise the risk of recurrence and to rapidly deal with symptoms if they come back.
• This puts you in control of your treatment safely and effectively.
• The likelihood of problems persisting are minimised through self-treatment and self-maintenance.