The Key Approach Model explains the link between pain syndromes and movement dysfunctions of the spine and proximal limb girdles. Spinal movement dysfunction is corrected by modifying movement behaviour in order to treat the pain syndromes the dysfunction has caused. We ‘train the brain to fix the pain’ .

The Key Approach model principally focuses on understanding spinal health – and the signs of its ‘disease’. It provides a simple classification system that maps what commonly goes awry with spinal control and how this can relate to symptoms – be it low back and pelvic pain, limb pain or other spinal and related pain disorders. Classifying a client based on their particular movement dysfunction provides a road map that points you, the clinician, in the right direction and offers treatment and management strategies to help restore more optimum function for your client. Addressing the ‘abnormal’ functional behaviour will, in general, alleviate your client’s symptoms.

The Key Approach is a practical clinical model which adopts an integrated systems (i.e. nervous, myo-fascial and skeletal systems) approach to the body’s function. The model will stimulate you to think — outside the square — yet with deductive reasoning. It helps you to look at the patient in a different way. It will help you know what to look for; how to recognize and examine what you see and then make sense of what you find to explain that person’s problem.

The aim is to simply help you deal more effectively with the problems commonly encountered in daily clinical musculoskeletal practice.

The model helps the manual therapist see why certain joints and the related soft tissues might be pain producing. and enables the movement therapist to sharpen up their observational skills and discern what movements need to be re-patterned and relearned.