11/23/2025
What is “manual therapy”? (And does it work?)
Weirdly, there isn’t really a good WORD for all the kinds of professionals that try to help people with injury rehab and pain. What do you CALL them, if you have to write about them constantly?
Every option is flawed, and it sure gets tedious LISTING them every time: physical therapists, massage therapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, occupational therapists! I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve had to type THAT in a quarter century of doing this.
And it’s a real annoyance that you can’t even conveniently abbreviate them all, a mental hangnail. CHIROS and OSTEOS and PHYSIOS are all concise and tidy and even rhyme … but then there’s the massage and occupational therapists! The ‘massas’ and ‘occus’? Ugh! 😜
And, no, never ever ever say “masseurs”!
Nor do you dare abbreviate “pedorthists.” 😏
By about 2020, I had more or less settled on “manual therapists” as the most useful catch-all terms for the professions I most often pick on, er, write about.
There are EIGHTEEN HUNDRED USAGES of that term on PainScience.com, because it’s the least bad option I’ve come across.
But it’s not perfect! For instance, a lot of patients have no idea what I’m talking about if I say “there’s a lot of bu****it in manual therapy.”
And so I finally wrote an article about it — and a fairly substantial one, because it’s a critical analysis of the whole CATEGORY — a guide to the Big Ideas and Claims that several professions all roughly share in common.
In other words, this is my wide perspective on the idea of "manual therapy" after more than twenty years of experience and study, after writing dozens of heavily referenced articles about the specifics.
https://www.painscience.com/manual_therapy
There's also a full audio version for members.
~ Paul Ingraham, PainScience.com publisher
