Richard Ulm  0:05 

Hey guys, Dr. Richard Ulm here, I’m here with Dr. Jordan Meyer. We’re both trained in McKenzie. I’m a certified McKenzie provider, and he’s a soon-to-be.

Jordan Meyer  0:14 

Soon-to-be.

Richard Ulm  0:16 

Soon-to-be studying for the test. So, he’ll soon-to-be studying. Hopefully, he’ll get certified. I have high confidence in him. The question that we wanted to answer today is, is Mackenzie safe? So, we get that a lot from patients, we certainly get that a lot from comments online. And the short answer is yes. But we kind of wanted to talk about the main reasons why it’s safe.

Jordan Meyer  0:36 

Yeah. It’s safe for a number of reasons, but the main thing is because it’s a lot of a hands-off approach. So, we use what’s called the progression of forces in the technique, which means, essentially, we apply the lowest amount of force possible early on, and then, depending on how the patient responds to the cares, then we then gradually increase the force.

Richard Ulm  0:56 

Yeah. So we want to start with the… We’re basically trying to find the minimum necessary force to achieve the positive outcome. And the mainstay, like a principle of McKenzie, is that everything that we’re doing is based on your response, you being the patient, your response to the intervention. So, like Dr. Meyer just said, we’re always going to start with the lightest, least amount of force possible, check the response, and make sure that what we’re doing is actually producing the positive result. Once we find that amount of force that’s producing that result, then we can stay there. We’re not going to come in and just sort of do a violent neck adjustment or a violent back adjustment right along the way.

Jordan Meyer  1:40 

Right. And we get that a lot. And then, there’s plenty of times, you would probably agree that we just don’t even have to use manipulation if we don’t need to.

Richard Ulm  1:42 

Yeah, I do.

Jordan Meyer  1:47 

We might use this instead.

Richard Ulm  1:48 

Yeah, it depends. But the short answer is, yes, it is safe. The reason it is safe is because, like Dr. Meyer said, we’re going to take you through a very gentle progression of forces, starting with the least amount of force possible, and progressing to the point where we find a therapeutic dose, meaning, the force, the volume, the exercise is adequate and sufficient to produce the positive result. We don’t need to go anywhere past that. If you’ve got more questions about what does the McKenzie evaluation look like, check through this playlist here. Or even how do you integrate manipulation with McKenzie. So, we’ve got lots of videos here for you. Hopefully, that helps.