The Sarah Key method

 For many years His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has been concerned about the number of people suffering from back pain and making both the understanding of how problems develop and how to treat them accessible to his fellow man.  

In 2002 His Royal Highness asked Sarah Key to develop a teaching model offering a fresh perspective on treating backs for the benefit of post-graduate physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths and general practitioners and hopefully for the population at large. In 2003 Sarah Key ran her first ‘Problem Back Masterclasses’ courses in the UK and later in Australia. These are now running several times a year with delegates coming from all points on the globe.

Recently, Sarah Key Masterclasses  have come under the umbrella of The Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Integrated Health.  Sarah is the principal lecturer and all proceeds from the courses run in the UK go to the FIH. Sarah’s work here is done on a charitable basis.

Sarah Key is the author of several popular books on back problems, ‘Back In Action’, ‘Keep Your Joints Young’ and ‘The Back Sufferers’ Bible’.  Work is currently underway submitting a text book for publication with the working title of ‘The Five Stages of Breakdown of a Lumbar Spinal Segment’, subtitled ‘A New Approach to Therapeutics and Self Treatment for Low Back Pain’.

 Recent Trends

Sarah Key is currently involved on a pilot study funded by the BackCare Charity. The project will study disc healing at Bristol University under the leadership of preeminent spine researchers Mike Adams PhD and Trish Dolan PhD which is the precursor to several larger studies to be focused on conservative therapy for back problems, with the emphasis on self treatment. Work started on the project in August 2009.


In many respects, the current collaborative works between Sarah Key and spinal researchers of the calibre of Adams and Dolan is the acme of a professional and clinical evolution. The combined product of Sarah Key’s distilled knowledge as a clinician working on backs for nearly four decades and the back-up of the latest scientific information as the bedrock underpinning this new concept has the potential to provide a step change in the delivery of effective spinal treatment worldwide.  

By providing a rational scientific base for physical treatment, Sarah has felt able to branch out and tackle more arcane aspects of getting backs better and what healing is.  Sarah feels that if you have the science right, with a clearer understanding of normal physiology and function and what causes it to go awry to become pathological, then  one can be more open-minded and accepting of the value of other, less well-understood [and often ancient] practices such as acupuncture, meditation, hypnosis, breathing control and relaxation.

BackCare must be commended for funding this important early research on disc healing. Up to now, most spinal research has been for the benefit of surgeons, although latterly [and perhaps because of the universally poor results of laminectomy and spinal fusion to wit The Cochrane Review] the trend has been towards less invasive intervention, such as spinal implants and autologous disc cell grafting. Even so, the emphasis has always been on advanced back pathology, with little focus on earlier spinal conditions which may be completely reversible through gentle physical measures aimed at improving the fluid exchange and nutrition through the intervertebral discs. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is the patron of the BackCare Charity.

The Science to date

According to Mike Adams PhD, there seems to have been a blind spot in scientific circles about disc healing. And it is perhaps for this reason that conservative therapy has lacked the scientific support to explain itself and direct what it is doing. In the past, practitioners have simply done things because they felt they worked. There has certainly been no consensus that early disc degeneration is the core condition, nor that impaired disc nutrition is the root cause, even though this is now generally accepted and despite the fact that it was postulated some 40 years ago by one of the earliest spine researchers, Alf Nachemson. There has certainly been no focus in therapeutic circles of using treatment techniques specifically to bolster normal [but failing] physiological processes in order to reverse a pathological trend caused by poor disc nutrition.
 
A central tenet of the Sarah Key Method, espoused in ‘Sarah Key Problem Back Masterclasses’ is self treatment. Here, a large part of conservative management is carried out by patients treating themselves daily at home with a program of ‘pressure change therapy’ [PCT]. Early spinal mobilisation treatment is needed by a trained therapist to bring the mobility of all the spinal segments up to par, but quite quickly patients take over their own management. This has obvious psychological benefits for the patients but there is also the potential for huge cost savings, to governments, local area health authorities, insurance companies, industry, business and patients themselves. PCT comprises simple, specific end-of-range spinal movements to enhance fluid movement through the lumbar discs. The ‘artificial pump’ of PCT aims to bolster disc nutrition when declining disc function caused by the degeneration process impairs the circulation and retention of discal fluids.