Research For GP's

In this section of the site, you will find articles written by David Morley aimed at medical professionals.

Is The Chiropractic Profession Where it needs to be?

Chiropractic as a profession has been around for over 100 years and yet, despite many years passing after its inception, chiropractic has largely failed to define itself in a way that is scientifically coherent and understandable to both the public and the medical profession. This failure has largely prevented the profession from establishing its cultural authority over any specific domain of healthcare. Read more

Simple Concepts in Starting to Understand Spinal Pain

Throughout the years of the chiropractic profession, there have been a number of models and theories to understand the nature of the back pains that we see in daily practice. While the early theories of 'structural misalignment' have largely been replaced with a functional model of back pain, clinicians often become wrapped up in the exact tissue lesion (zygapophysial joints, annular tears of discs, muscle-tendon strain etc.), rather than take a step back and understand the larger picture of the functional problem. Read more

Back Pain - Peripheral, Central, or Both?

In our last blog, we touched upon the concept of proprioception - information via nerve impulses from muscles, ligaments and joints that help determine localised muscle tone, resting joint position and the trajectory any given joint can move before injury is sustained. All of this information, of course, is monitored and modulated by higher centres of our Brain. So what happens when we finally succumb to a painful episode of back pain? Is it a localised event? or is there a more global effect that takes place without our conscious awareness? It seems the latter is the case, and back pain is more than just a mere localised phenomenon. Read more

Facet Joints of the Spine  What do we really know

When asked the question "Where does spinal pain come from?", most of us would consider the facet joints to be a prime source. Indeed, epidemiology tells us that 31% of chronic lumbar pain and 55% of persistent cervical pain arises from the facet joint 'tissues' (1). But exactly what 'tissues' are we talking about? Read more