The Key Approach® decodes spinal pain. Like a 'clinical blueprint', it provides a framework for understanding spinal health — and the signs of its 'dis-ease' — and what to do about it.
The Central Proposition
Spinal pain syndromes are linked to posturo-movement dysfunction of the torso. Simply observing how the spine resolves gravity and moves provides the basis for a clinical classification system — one that guides further assessment and delineates individualised treatment protocols specific to each person's particular pattern of dysfunction.
The Key Approach® is an evidence-informed, highly practical clinical model. It represents a distinct departure from existing frameworks, developed and refined through decades of clinical practice, research, and teaching.
How It Works
The model adopts an integrated systems approach — encompassing the nervous, myofascial, and skeletal systems — to understanding torso function and dysfunction.
Classifying a patient according to their particular posturo-movement dysfunction provides a clinical road map: it points the clinician in the right direction for further assessment and guides the formulation of individualised treatment and management strategies aimed at restoring more optimal function.
More specifically, addressing the abnormal functional behaviour found across the joint, myofascial, and neural systems will, in general, alleviate the patient’s symptoms — whether that presentation is low back and pelvic pain, neck pain, or other spinal and related limb pain disorders.
What It Changes in Practice
The patient is telling us a great deal — if only we properly look. Clinicians commonly miss the valuable clues that might otherwise help them understand what has gone awry with spinal control and how this relates to symptoms.
The Key Approach® helps you:
- Know what to look for — and how to recognise it
- Examine what you see with precision and purpose
- Make sense of what you find to explain that person's problem
- Formulate treatment that is specific, individualised, and logically derived from your findings
The model serves both the manual therapist and the movement therapist. It helps the manual therapist understand why certain joints and related soft tissues may be pain-producing. It sharpens the movement therapist's observational skills and clarifies which movement patterns need to be re-patterned and relearned.
The Underlying Principle
Spinal movement dysfunction is corrected by modifying movement behaviour in order to treat the pain syndromes that dysfunction has caused.
We train the brain to fix the pain.
The Aim
To help clinicians deal more effectively with the problems commonly encountered in daily musculoskeletal practice — by looking at the patient differently, reasoning more deductively, and thinking, where necessary, outside the square.