Neurofascial Release: Spinal Manipulation Using Inherent Body Forces

With Stephen Myles Davidson, D.O.

A full hour of hands-on palpatory instruction. $149.95. Lifetime access in the members’ area.

Most manipulation is taught as a series of techniques. This course teaches you a method instead: define a parameter, analyze it, apply the principle, then go back and see what changed. Once you have that sequence in your hands, every joint in the spine becomes the same problem with different anatomy.

Dr. Davidson walks you region by region from the sacroiliac joint to the dens, showing exactly where to put your fingers and, more importantly, what to listen for once they are there. You will learn to move tissue at tissue speed rather than at your speed, to read the quality of an end feel, and to recognize the change in tissue resilience that tells you whether the body wants a direct or an indirect approach. Then you wind the strain through the whole body and let the patient’s own respiratory, circulatory, and cranial motions do the correcting.

What you will take back to the treatment room on Monday:

• The innominate as a wheel: distraction, clock-face rotation, and release at the SI joint
• Long-lever release of the pelvis about a fixed L5, and why one side is enough
• Twirling lumbar spinous processes to find the segment that moves least
• The first rib and its role in thoracic outlet syndrome, including how to palpate it without mashing the brachial plexus
• Subluxed rib heads, medial and lateral, and the correction that must come before anything else
• Cervical translation testing, both long-lever and compression approaches
• The occipitoatlantal joint as a defective ball and socket, and why whiplash patients extend but cannot flex
• A careful, respectful approach to the dens and the atlantoaxial joint

Along the way you get the anatomy that actually changes your hands: asymmetrical lumbar facets and the gait pattern they produce, the radiate ligaments binding rib heads to two vertebral bodies and the disc between them, sympathetic chain ganglia sitting on the front of every rib head, and the asymmetry of the foramen magnum that no textbook drawing prepares you for.

This is Part One of the Neurofascial Release series, grounded in Dr. Davidson’s Manual Medicine: A Primer and in three Still principles: the rule of the artery, the interrelationship of structure and function, and the inherent healing power of the body.

If you have been treating segments and want to start treating the whole mechanism, start here.

$149.95. One-time purchase. Stream it as often as you like.