We are so grateful to the Australasian College of Soft Tissue Therapy for hosting us at their 5th Mid Week Mastery Conference in Melbourne this month.

Kent and Joanne were joined by APA Sports Physiotherapist and former elite athlete Andrew Wynd, each delivering talks on the theme “Seeing Common Presentations From A Different Perspective”

Joanne Elphinston – Serving Up a Challenge: Using Global Movement Principles To Get To The Source Of An Upper Limb Injury

The patient, a tennis player, presents with severe wrist pain, an apparent overuse injury. Why is this area being overused? You make a structural diagnosis. What next? Are you content to relieve the symptoms, or keen to prevent their recurrence by looking beyond the site of pain to identify the root cause?  In this presentation, Joanne used a real, function specific patient case study to illustrate how simple global movement principles can guide a clinician past the site of pathology to the source of dysfunction. The lecture traced the clinical reasoning pathway as it progressively unfolds, demonstrating the need for manual therapy integration, identifying the links between the patient’s presentation and their specific functional biomechanics, assessing the necessary movement components and addressing them, in order to relieve the focal stress at the very end of the kinetic chain.

Watch a snippet of Joanne’s talk on Facebook

Kent Fyrth – Locked Out: The Emotional Brain in Movement and Rehabilitation

Are persistent dysfunctional muscle patterns and poor movement control all a matter of motor learning? Is it really just practice makes perfect and sheer repetition that makes the change? Or is there another factor that could be the key to unlocking these issues?  From acute trauma to chronic stress, the limbic system can profoundly affect movement performance, body awareness and motor control. Its effects are prevalent in musculoskeletal patients, yet are often unrecognised, and their management is rarely addressed in professional training.  Using real patient scenarios, Kent illustrated a selection of the presenting features of limbic involvement that practitioners may encounter in musculoskeletal practice, simple techniques to address them, and a guide to “first aid” if treatment provokes an unexpected emotional crisis.

Andrew Wynd – Zooming In and Zooming Out: Taking a key clinical concept and applying it to a foot pain case study

The ability to zoom into the specific detail of a given area of the body, but then to zoom out and look at where this fits in the overall picture is a critical skill for any advanced clinician. Andrew presented a real-life example of insidious onset foot pain in an athlete, requiring very detailed examination of the foot and its local structures. The case study then zoomed out to develop a deeper understanding of how the foot is integrated into the whole body and that this is a two-way street.