ACE Blog
Review our past newsletters below and stay up to date with hot new topics.
The Whole Picture: Why Pathophysiology Matters in clinical practice
A patient walks into your clinic with anterior knee pain. Their quads are weak. Squatting hurts. Stairs are a problem. Easy. Strengthen the quads. Except… why are the quads weak? That question matters more than we sometimes realise. Because weakness isn’t always simply a lack of strength. Sometimes the nervous system is actively limiting how […]
Placebo: One of the Most Powerful Tools in the Manual Therapist’s Toolkit
The word placebo has a branding problem. In healthcare, calling something a placebo is often interpreted as saying the treatment is fake, the practitioner is somehow tricking the patient or—perhaps worst of all—that the patient’s improvement is “all in their head.” But that’s not what modern placebo research tells us. In fact, placebo research provides […]
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Push it Further Along
I was reading the comment section of a physiotherapist’s Instagram post where they had used an AI generated poster to convey quite thought provoking, evidence-based messaging. A commentor called it ‘AI Slop’ and that ‘if you continue with this, I’m going to unfollow you.’ The therapist replied, ‘What about this makes it “AI slop”? I […]
The part of treatment no one talks about
As clinicians and particularly as manual therapists, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the ‘manual therapy stuff’ that we do… Techniques. Dosage. Assessment. Clinical reasoning. Exercise selection. Mechanisms. Pain science. And rightly so, they all matter. But there is another ingredient in our practice that can dramatically shape […]
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. […]
