ACE Blog
Review our past newsletters below and stay up to date with hot new topics.
The broken record of clinical practice
Back pain and imaging findings such as disc herniations are common in clinical practice, with lower back pain having the highest prevalence of musculoskeletal conditions worldwide. Being treated as an epidemic and the likelihood for most individuals to experience an episode in their lifetime, there’s little wonder of why poor understanding is common and misinformation […]
Mechanisms Not Mechanics
Understanding the mechanisms behind the manual therapies you use, will forever change the way you design and deliver your treatments. I know that when I went through my undergraduate training, much of the explanations I was given for how the various manual therapies work, was based on the mechanics of force, load and tissue response. […]
My Biggest Mistake in Practice
My biggest mistake in practice – Several years ago, I had a patient with posterior hip pain who’d seen as many therapists. I was not just overconfident in telling her that I could help her achieve her goals, but I also wasn’t very honest in hindsight. Each session I was using positive language that she’d be feeling much better afterwards, we just need to keep trying. I also didn’t give her any idea of an ongoing treatment plan or prognosis. I’d hoped that she was […]
Why do you need to know that
Do you take any recreational or performance enhancing substances? These are questions that would sound quite fitting to a police interview room, or maybe an attorney’s line of questioning of a witness. But they’re also on most allied health professional’s intake forms. These are very personal and intrusive questions to ask a stranger. We then […]
What is in your manual therapy cocktail?
As we each progress through our individual careers in manual therapy, we tend to accumulate various skills, tools and approaches. Our professional development is often built on the idea that we need to learn new things and “stack” modalities into our toolkit. What I’ve often seen happen is practitioners ultimately feeling the need to utilise […]
The Power of the Inverse
Unlike many of my peers, I had enjoyed mathematics through high school, particularly algebra and inverse functions. I’ve not continued with any mathematical study since then, but I do consider the usefulness of these exercises in the way of conversation and reasoning almost daily. Consider the common expression; “Something is better than nothing”. I’ve struggled […]
