04/13/2026
It makes sense to assume that where you hurt is where the problem is. And sometimes that’s true. But in musculoskeletal care, it’s often just the starting point.
That’s why we put such a serious emphasis on our palpation skills at CIH, and why Drs. Neagle and McLenithan spent this past weekend in Bridgeport with Dr. Mark King of the Motion Palpation Institute sharpening exactly that.
Here’s what they were actually working on and why it matters for you:
👉Palpation is the clinical skill of feeling what’s happening in tissue, joints, and movement, and it’s foundational to us for diagnosis and understanding. It’s not just pressing on something sore, but much much more than that: reading the quality of motion, resistance, and restriction with enough precision to locate the actual problem. It sounds basic but there’s an immense amount of complexity to it.
👉Regional interdependence is the understanding that the body doesn’t experience pain in isolation. A stiff thoracic spine can drive shoulder dysfunction. A restricted hip can show up as knee pain. Where you hurt and where the problem lives are often two different addresses, and missing that distinction means treating symptoms instead of causes.
👉The kinesthetic chain is the connective thread between all of it: how load and movement travel through the body, and how a breakdown anywhere in that chain creates compensation patterns everywhere else.
Spinal manipulation is one of the most effective tools we have in musculoskeletal care. But it’s the diagnostic thinking underneath it — the palpation, the pattern recognition, the whole-body picture — that determines whether it’s the right tool, applied to the right place, at the right time.
Thank you MPI and Dr. King for an outstanding seminar!
