About “Natural Spine-Care Therapy”

Hello, and  Thanks for looking here.

I'm Dr. Stephen Newdell. I'll give you a quick explanation of

• The background and Creation of Manual Spine-Care Therapy
• what we do,
• how we do it,
• how it compares to other types of back-pain practice techniques
• The approximate price practitioners charge.
• What to expect for your first visit.
• Why I think the Manual Spine-Care Therapy Techniques are the world's best for back-pain and other muscle and joint pains.
• A few of Dr. Newdell's Qualification Certificates can be seen HERE

Manual Spine-Care Therapy is a technique I developed between 1975 and this year 2023. That comes to 48 years of doing the technique, thinking about it, rewriting theory, testing variations on patients, comparing results, learning more ideas from other teacher/practitioners, and working to get the best results I could get while in practice. Even now, I care for patients in a part-time practice in my “retirement” years, and continue to study the works of other natural healing practitioners.

A Brief Timeline of Development: In the years of the late 1800’s Daniel D. Palmer, in Davenport, Iowa, USA, developed a thesis about spine care. He spoke about it with Andrew T. Still, who developed Osteopathy. Their theories and practice differed and they went their separate ways.

The old-fashioned Osteopathy of that time is still practiced today in Russia and is often called “Bone Setting.” It’s violently rough and often painful. It relies on using muscle and ligaments under stress to move joints and the fascia (flesh) around the joints.

Dr. Palmer theorized that misaligned spinal joint structures caused pressure on nerve roots where they leave the spinal cord and pass between spinal bones (vertebra) and continue to muscles and organs. These nerves are the "living wires" that carry information from the brain to the body and return information back to the brain.

These nerves supply information to the muscles and to various organs. If they are not able to work normally the patient will experience pain, weakness, other odd symptoms, and perhaps systemic organ illness. Modern research has proven that Dr. Palmer’s thesis was correct.

Daniel D. Palmer’s technique was firstly involved in caring for neck pain and spine bone (vertebral) misalignments. His son, B.J. Palmer continued the research and development, beginning a school to teach it in 1897. Over several years, engineers worked with B.J., made more technique improvements, and developed equipment to help the practitioner to realign the spine more efficiently.

Their focus was almost entirely on joint structure and misalignment. There was no discussion about balancing muscles until the year 1950 and the subject was for the most part ignored until Dr. George Goodheart published his first work about a technique, he called Applied Kinesiology in the early 1960’s.

As a field of research, kinesiology focuses particularly on the mechanics of muscular activity. It considers body movement and how muscles work together to cause the human body to work in good coordination. Dr. Goodheart applied postural observation and specific muscle testing to various joint misalignments and developed a better understanding of why joints misalign and what can be done to realign them and restore muscle balance around the joints so they would stay properly aligned. This was a major advance in the art and science of the field called Chiropractic, but it was not taught in the Chiropractic colleges until the early 1970’s.

Other practitioners added their own ideas to the Applied Kinesiology studies and in my opinion, it became a rather complicated muddle.

I had learned a lot of the Applied Kinesiology basics and used the work with my patients. But I wanted better results and began to experiment more with combining Classic (also called Swedish) massage with my adjusting technique and testing the results for comparisons.

I eventually stopped using a myriad of contact points and acupuncture energy points because I found from muscle testing that the patient’s body would balance all of those energy flows naturally after I did a combination of basic Classic Massage and then gently adjusted the spinal vertebra back into their proper juxtapositions.

My study in Classic massage began long before Chiropractic college. I simply brought what I knew to school with me and later took further formal courses in a massage school in Davenport, Iowa and in another massage school in Chicago, where I also worked teaching for a while.

Classic massage can be traced back at least 5,000 years. There are European cave drawings thought to be perhaps 25,000 years old depicting people working on someone’s back. Some sort of massage has been ongoing for all the length of time that people could be called human.

In the early 1800s, Swedish doctor/gymnast/teacher Per Henrik Ling began studying and teaching massage and the practice which had languished in obscurity began to be appreciated and became popular again. Dr. Ling was not the first developer of massage for healing. He was a doctor interested in improving health-care techniques and he continued to test, study and develop more of what Massage study has become today.

In similar fashion, I did not develop Chiropractic or Applied Kinesiology or Massage. I developed methods to bring these disciplines together in my effort to get better results for patients with back-pain and other joint pains, and reduce the extraneous complexity that had corrupted (my opinion) the original George Goodheart technique.

Discover How YOU Can Become A Manual Back Pain Therapist and finally a Natural Spine-Care Therapist. 

 My survey showed that 95% of my patients were very satisfied. Approximately 4% simply could not be reached for a response. The other 1% apparently thought they wanted the more forceful types of techniques, or wanted some sort of instant miracle, which I could not provide.

Over-all we went from 70 or 75% saying Chiropractic care was good for them, to 95% saying the combination of Chiropractic + Massage was much better and brought about better comfort, range of motion and general mobility and well-being. One patient told me, "When I visit a different Chiropractor I am not satisfied. When I go to a Massage Therapist I am dissatisfied. When I come to you I leave completely satisfied." Apparently she was not alone in this opinion. In my final year in practice I saw 263 New Patients! I did no advertising. They all came as referrals from friends.

At this writing I have observed my 73^rd birthday and I’m still studying and learning more about what can be done to help even the most difficult cases.

What we do and how we do it:

As quickly as I can arrange it, you’ll find videos available to see me working on patients.

Patients remain dressed through the entire procedure and visits take about 25-minutes each.

I begin with a quick postural analysis and sometimes ask the patient to bend to measure range of motion. This analysis shows me what muscles are working as they should and which are not presently doing their job.

For nervous system physiological reasons, I advise practitioners to begin with the patient lying supine (face up), testing muscles, massaging the back of his/her neck and gently wiggling or adjusting the neck vertebra into their correct positions. This process usually releases a problem with a major cranial nerve. The release of pressure on that nerve root causes the muscles holding the hip and low back alignment to begin working normally again.

The next logical assistance then would be to help restore the proper alignment of the hips and sacrum (the sacroiliac joints). They are the foundation under the spine.

There’s no logical reason to try to build a straight house on a cooked foundation. Similarly….

There’s no logic to try to cause a twisted spine to stand straight on twisted hips.

The practitioner would now adjust the hip joints (The Sacroiliac articulations).  I ask the patient to lie (prone) face down and then often place pillows or wedges under the patient’s hips to help restore the normal low back forward curve. Massaging into this curve will further help to restore the correct low back vertebral positioning. High force and speed is not required.

The practitioner will massage muscles that originate from the sides of your buttocks and lead into the femur head joints at the top of your legs  and up into the low back and further up through the mid and upper spine, gently wiggling and adjusting the spine as he massages working up the spine. 

The therapist is advised to pay attention to and massage the muscles you see here colored red.

The therapist may also pay attention to knees, ankles and foot misalignments. 

After some final spinal realignments, most often done by hand, and perhaps some final muscle tests the therapist will give you final advice and suggest the best timing for your next visit and treatment.

The comparisons of what we do to what others do is most notably that you remain dressed, the massage is intended to be gentle but effective, the spinal realignment is also gentle and effective. You’ll feel and perhaps “hear” spinal vertebra and the fascia around them moving, as your body is repositioning and balancing joints and the soft tissue around them. You’ll note that your pains are clearing away and your range of motion is improving.

If you are past your 25^th birthday you might experience a little bit of muscle soreness for a day or two and then you’ll realize that you’re feeling much better. That is the normal course of events.

Some Chiropractors and Osteopaths are much rougher and cause some discomfort. Many Massage Therapists spend more time per session, but do not realign the spine because they were never taught to do so. They may comfort you and say they hope this will bring about improvement, but they have no science to prove that realignment of the spine has occurred and that muscles are balanced and maintaining their corrected repositioning.

I think the Manual Spine-Care Therapy Techniques are the world's best for back-pain and other muscle and joint pains because we use scientific testing and evidence to prove what is misaligned. We can demonstrate when muscles are not able to work properly and then demonstrate after the treatment that they are working properly again. No other technique does that.

We look for the cause of the problem and correct it, and we see patients get great results and remain comfortable and mobile, enjoying a normal healthy life again.

I say this without reservation. I have helped patients after car crashes. I have helped patients who were in pain for months, even years. I have seen patients get out of wheel chairs and begin living normal lives again. I have cared for babies and young children and watched them get healthy after I removed pressure on nerves and allowed their body to restore normal nervous system response and activity. For Chiropractors these results also are considered normal expectations.

The students I have been training are doing excellent work, learning more all the time and getting gratifying results, at prices that are close to what you would pay to visit a general practitioner medical doctor.

Many patients imagine they need surgery. That is more often than not, an incorrect assumption. The correct course of action for nearly any condition is to approach it with natural healing and herbal medicine means first. If there is no improvement consult a medical physician. The last resort is the most radical treatment of all, which is surgery. We should avoid such radical measures if possible.

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