ABC™ was developed in the US in the 1980s and 1990s by Dr Jesse Jutkowitz. Coming from an engineering background, he became interested in how the human body works just like a machine: all parts continuously work together as a single unit, and problems in one part always affect the entire system (just like in a machine such as a car).

He changed careers and became a chiropractor to learn more about the mechanics involved in the human body. However, very soon he became disillusioned with traditional chiropractic methods. Why did they produce great results on some patients, average results on others, and adverse effects on yet others? Wouldn’t this be the same as fixing 1,000 car engines of the same make and model with the same tools and procedures and producing different results each time? Surely there had to be a more consistent method. He critically looked into the different treatment methods available at the time, only to find that the people who had developed them and were practicing them had run into exactly the same problems: results were generally good but often inconsistent. So he went back right to the basics…

His engineering background gave him a unique starting point because he understood what many people had missed about structure, tension, leverage, and mechanical load. He then discovered Swedish neurosurgeon Alf Breig’s ground-breaking work on Adverse Mechanical Tension in the Central Nervous System. Working in the 1950s to 1980s, Breig had discovered that structural misalignments (especially flexion or leaning forward) caused an enormous amount of tension in the spinal cord and nervous system overall. Putting together the basic anatomical fact that bones cannot get pulled back from a “forward” direction – and that “forward” automatically means flexion, the key mechanical or physics-based puzzle pieces were right there on the table. Another neurosurgeon named Yamada was working on something called “Tethered Cord Syndrome”. This basically means that the spinal cord and its protective coverings (the meninges) can become “stuck”, and this can cause a variety of physical ailments. Dr Jutkowitz was really just the first person to assemble basic anatomy, basic physics, and ground-breaking neuroscience together into a full picture.

1. The body is a partially self-correcting unit. It can fix some but not all structural misalignments
2. The body cannot pull bones back from a “forward” direction because it has no muscles that pull in the right direction
3. Being stuck “forward” means flexion
4. Flexion has the greatest effect on nervous system tension
5. To reduce nervous system tension, the body twists up in other places
6. It becomes unstable against gravity and distributes its weight differently/unevenly
7. Wrong mechanical load leads to “wear and tear”, pain, tight muscles, and a host of other ailments
8. By addressing the underlying problems which the body cannot fix by itself, the twisting-up process can get reversed

In the initial phase of the research, Dr Jutkowitz took xrays of patients and carefully measured the angles between the individual spinal bones and how they changed over time. The result is a host of invaluable information about body mechanics, documenting the reversal of many changes to bony structure which the medical profession had previously declared impossible to correct. Because of the understanding gained in these early days, we now don’t need to take xrays in most cases. We do require them if we want to rule out changes caused by cancer, infection, or fractures.

How is Advanced Biostructural Correction™ different from traditional bodywork methods?

In many ways, ABC™ does the exact opposite of traditional methods such as chiropractic, osteopathy, physiotherapy, etc. This is for several reasons:

ABC™ is a holistic approach, i.e. it considers the mechanical / structural state of the entire skeletal frame; it doesn’t just treat where it hurts. A physiotherapist might stretch a muscle here, massage another muscle there, mobilise a joint, and give you some stretches for homework. A chiropractor might find an individual misaligned bone in your spine and address that, without asking whether there is an underlying reason for it to be misaligned in this particular way.

In fact, let’s take traditional chiropractic as an example: it was developed in the US in 1895. Around the same time, xrays were discovered. People soon noticed that bones appeared to have moved “backwards” in the spine if looked at from the side. The idea was to put the patient face-down and push the bone back into place – “forward”. This is still the most common approach in traditional chiropractic methods today and gets taught at all chiropractic schools across the globe.

If you have been following our website or blog even for a little while, you will know that “forward” is the only direction from which the body cannot pull bones back into position. This is not simply a belief we hold. This is based on basic anatomy and basic physics. “Forward” is the enemy.

Advanced Biostructural Correction™ literally works in the opposite way. It finds those bones that are stuck “forward” and pushes them backwards. To do so, we stand our patients up against the wall and gently lean into them to push bones back towards the wall. This does not require much force at all, and the results are instantly observable in most cases: the body pops up straighter and starts untwisting at the first visit. We document the changes by taking pictures so our patients can see the results for themselves.

By taking care of the underlying problem rather than addressing compensatory changes, ABC™ produces consistent and predictable results on a scale previously unheard of in structural bodywork or even in traditional healthcare. We do not make these claims lightly. Our teams at in Falkirk and Perth and our colleagues across the globe have seen the results in thousands of patients. At PPWC we are actively engaged in ground-breaking research to document and publish the results we see in our everyday experience.