McKenzie Technique Neck Demonstration

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dr. Steve Minors of Rehab Effects here in Austin, Texas. And right now we're going to talk about The McKenzie Technique and applying it to the neck or the cervical spine. So in our previous segment we discussed what the McKenzie Technique is and how it effects the spine but now we're going to actually show you on a patient what it looks like. Slide up to me please. So for a patient who may have herniated disc or a bulging disc in the neck and they may have radiating pain into the shoulder or down the arm and into the fingers. Sometimes they have pain into the mid back and it's coming from the neck. This particular technique is maybe indicated. There's several different positions that you can have the patient in. We're just only going to show one today. So we're going to stretch the neck a little bit, retract the chin and slowly go back as far as the patient is comfortable. Then we're going to give a little wiggle, trying to get the neck to go back further. Further, further, further. Come back, keeping the chin retracted, to the neutral position. Patient relaxing. And you do that again. You'll do that approximately ten to fifteen times, then check patient's status. For the patient who presents with the neck pain and the radiating pain down into the hand, by performing an exercise such as this one or one of the various techniques that McKenzie invented. What we are wanted to do is to centralize the pain. When it's going down the arm into the fingers, is what we would call peripheralizing. We want to centralize that. So instead of it being in the fingers or the hand, we want to try to get it to move up, maybe into the forearm or the elbow. Then from the elbow into the upper arm or shoulder. And then, to eventually get it to where it's only in the neck and then eventually it goes away. The pain virtually leaves. That is the purpose and main reason why you would perform these exercises."