What Can NAIOMT Do For You?

  • Lay a strong foundation in clinical reasoning, enabling you to efficiently, confidently, and accurately evaluate any patient that comes into your clinic.
  • Increase confidence in knowing when to treat and when to refer a patient.
  • Improve the specificity and localization of your manual techniques, which will enable you to use less amplitude and force, increasing the range of patients that you can perform techniques on...regardless of your body size and shape.
  • Improve your knowledge of the small details that often make the difference between success and discharge with many patients, whether it is a detailed knowledge of anatomy, or biomechanics, or physiology.
  • Offer 1:1 mentorship with experience, trained orthopedic manual therapists. Whether at the residency or fellowship level, or on a more informal basis, NAIOMT can provide the 1:1 feedback and learning that is so vital to your development as a physical therapist.
NAIOMT's Kathy Stupansky teaching

What Makes Us Different?

  1. ECLECTICISM: Nothing works all of the time. Everything works some of the time. The best PTs to look at all the possibilities and make the best decisions for each patient in context. There’s no litmus tests for faculty, no creeds to sign. All thoughts and opinions are welcome.
  2. REASONING: Answers to difficult questions are rarely simple. Through attention to detail and a consistent structure to the thinking process, PTs can work through complicated patient cases in an efficient, accurate and repeatable manner.
  3. TECHNIQUE: For techniques to be effective, they need to be performed at the right time, in the right place, with the right amplitude and directions of forces. We believe that techniques can be very powerful when they are localized to a specific segment.
  4. EVIDENCE: All sources of evidence (literature, clinical experience, and the patient) should drive decision-making. There isn’t an article to drive decision-making in every case. Only by listening, watching, reading, and thinking can we consistently make good decisions.
  5. SAFETY: The correct diagnosis, knowing when examination and intervention techniques should not be used (this isn’t as often taught) to understanding when to refer patients, who to refer them to, and what to ask of the referral source…NAIOMT places safety at the forefront of everything we do.
  6. CASE-BASED INSTRUCTION: We believe that the best way to teach is to work through cases: real patients with real problems and real solutions. These provide the foundation and structure that allow the learner to deal with their complicated patients in their clinic.
  7. MENTORSHIP: Most research shows that learning in the continuing education model is only really effective when combined with in-clinic feedback from an experienced, trained mentor who can work with you to establish an individual plan for you based on your needs and on your time-line.
NAIOMT's Bill Temes
NAIOMT's Steve Allen teaching