Robin McKenzie

Robin Anthony McKenzie was born in New Zealand in 1931 and qualified as a physiotherapist at the New Zealand School of Physiotherapy in 1952, entering private practice in Wellington shortly afterward.

The method that carries his name came from an accident. A patient with severe back and leg pain was left lying face down on a treatment table that had been left in an extended position, and reported after some minutes that the pain in his leg had retreated toward his back, which was the opposite of what conventional practice at the time would have predicted. McKenzie followed the observation instead of the textbook.

What developed from it became Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy, usually called the McKenzie method. Its distinguishing feature is that it is diagnostic before it is therapeutic. The clinician applies repeated movements and observes the symptomatic response over time, and that response indicates the direction to work in. Two people with the same presentation may need opposite movements, and testing is the only way to establish which.

The concept of centralisation, in which pain retreating toward the spine or the joint center indicates progress even when intensity briefly rises, gave clinicians and patients a feedback signal that had not previously existed in usable form.

He published Treat Your Own Back in 1980 and followed it with self-treatment titles on the neck, shoulder, knee, and hip, on the principle that patients improve fastest when they can manage the condition themselves between appointments. The books are short, cheap, and explicit about which presentations require proper assessment instead.

He founded the McKenzie Institute International in 1982, which certifies clinicians worldwide. He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire and later to the New Zealand Order of Merit, and died in 2013.