Chiropractic and Applied Kinesiology

by
Dr. Robert Frost

Applied Kinesiology was created and developed by chiropractors. The founder of the field is Dr. George Goodheart, D.C. Dr. Goodheart had a patient whose shoulder blade stuck out from his back on one side. Dr. Goodheart had treated this patients several times with no visible improvement. He remembered reading something about the muscle that holds the shoulder blade down upon the back in the classic medical book on manual muscle testing by Kendall and Kendall. He looked it up and found that muscle to be the Serratus anticus sometimes called the Serratus anterior. It inserts (attaches) to several ribs along the side, and there looks serrated like a bread knife. The other end of the muscle, its origin, is under the medial side of the shoulder blade (scapula).

In order to try to find out what was wrong with this muscle, Dr. Goodheart carefully felt it (palpated) along its length as in the picture in the book. Where the muscle attached to the ribs, Dr. Goodheart felt little hard bumps which felt “like a BB under two slices of raw bacon”. Experimentally, he firmly massaged one of these lumps. It disappeared. He did so with the rest of the bumps. As he finished, he observed the shoulder blade pull down tightly to the back!

His patient asked Dr. Goodheart why he hadn’t done this in the first place. Dr. Goodheart, fully bewildered and now knowing why this happened at all said something like, “Well, we don’t correct problems like this all at once.”

Manual muscle testing has a long medical history. However, as far as we know, this was the first time that any manual intervention immediately changed the muscle tone and function. Dr. Goodheart shared this technique with his colleague chiropractors and all found it, at times, successful in restoring function to a flaccid muscle. Thus was the first therapeutic technique of the newly-born field of Applied Kinesiology – the “origin-insertion technique” born.

It is a basic principle of chiropractic that structure determines function. The origin-insertion technique, when it works, immediately changes the structure and function of the muscle treated and the bones attached to it.