Mark Laslett – Back Pain 301 – Mechanical Discogenic Pain

Why is Mechanical Discogenic Pain Important?

This is the most common back pain presentation seen by most clinicians. People may present with acute or persistent low back pain, with or without referred lower limb pain and demonstrate rapidly reversible symptoms with a mechanical approach to treatment.

This course covers the basic patho-anatomy of the anterior column and mechanical discogenic pain and teaches you how to identify those patients who are likely to do well with a mechanical approach to treatment. You will be shown how to assess and treat this patient group and how to guide them to functional recovery.

What You Will Learn:

In this course, you will learn:

• the theoretical and pathoanatomical foundation of the concept of mechanical discogenic pain.
• how the concept of the dynamic disc model relates to clinical presentations, including acute pain-related deformities such as the acute lateral shift.
• a theoretical basis for the phenomena of centralisation and directional preference
• how to perform and interpret a standardised repeated-movements assessment, adapted from the McKenzie (MDT) method to identify those likely to respond to this approach,
• how to treat this subgroup of patients during a painful episode, and guide them through rehabilitation to functional recovery.

The course includes a number of videos of live patient cases demonstrating how the diagnosis of mechanical discogenic pain is made and how it is treated, including examples of the centralisation and directional preference phenomena. You will also work through other case study examples for the different sub-categories of mechanical discogenic pain.

You will be able to download the patient cases and other clinical forms to use as a resource in your clinic.