Cox Flexion Distraction and My Family’s Trip to Florida

Posted On: April 29, 2012

I am David A. Johnson, DC, PT, DPT and I am one of the luckiest men on earth. This last spring break I got the opportunity to take my wife and my two girls to Florida as a result of my attendance of a Cox flexion distraction seminar.

One of the perks of being a professional is that I get to go to continuing education seminars in cool places and now that I am married I can take my family along with me.

I was first exposed to the Cox flexion distraction technique back in the 1980’s when I was a chiropractic student at the Logan College of Chiropractic. At that time a lot of what chiropractic was doing and teaching was very anecdotal and there wasn’t a lot of good evidenced based medicine being taught. Dr. James Cox was the exception to this rule. He developed a technique and published an evidenced based book about his technique long before anyone else in our profession.

I went to hear him speak and as a young student studying the sciences I was convinced of the validity of his technique. I read his book and pursued taking learning his technique through one of the modules at Logan. When I graduated my second expensive purchase in my practice was a Cox flexion distraction table (the first was an x-ray machine). I helped a lot of my early and many of my patients today with this technique.

I then went to a McKenzie seminar taught by Dr. Gary Jacob who was the first chiropractor to teach for this program. I was shocked because the McKenzie technique was almost in direct contradiction with Cox’s technique on how to treat patients with disc herniations. I questioned and challenged the Dr. Jacob on the premise of their approach. He simply showed me the evidence and showed me that McKenzie’s approach was valid.

I was forced to change my paradigm as a result of the new evidence I had been presented. So I did and I started to incorporate the McKenzie technique into my treatment protocols and I actually found that I got my disc herniation patients better faster than the results that I got with the Cox Technique.

There were however some recalcitrant cases of degenerative spinal stenosis that were helped more with a combination of flexion exercises, nerve mobilization and the use of Cox’s technique. So this is where I used the technique.

Last year I went to see Dr. Cox speak with Dr. Yochum at the National College of Chiropractic. It was good to see these two men. Let me tell you Dr. Cox was on fire. He has continued to fund and support research into his technique. NIH grants have been procured and research has been done as to what happens to the spine with the technique. One of my colleagues, a Dr. Murphy has recently published two excellent case series on the effectiveness of the technique combined with exercise and nerve mobilization for spinal stenosis and disc herniations.

As a result of my hearing Dr. Cox I decided to get recertified in his technique, so I went to Orlando. It was a great course and my girls got to go to Disneyworld for the first time. I am a lucky man.

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