Principles of Manual Therapy

The book Principles of MANUAL THERAPY is a valuable guide for the novice clinician to have a good basic overview of the principles underlying manual therapy. Manual therapy is used by clinicians including physical therapists to diagnose and treat soft tissue and joint structures for the purpose of decreasing pain, improving joint range and alignment, improving contractile and noncontractile tissue repair, extensibility and stability and facilitating function. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is again subdivided into three sections. Section 1 gives introduction to manual therapy and its principles. Section 2 is on spinal manipulation—cervical spine, thoracic spine, lumbar spine, and the pelvic complex. And, section 3 is on extremity manipulation—ankle and foot, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, and wrist and hand. Part 2 discusses the manual therapy approach to mechanical peripheral nerve entrapment dysfunction. Lastly, part 3 deals with regional (cervical, thoracic, lumbo-pelvic, hip, knee, ankle and foot, shoulder, and elbow-wrist-hand) conditions and relevant manual therapy intervention.