The International Consortium on Manual Therapies

by Sandy Fritz

I have been involved in the massage therapy community for a LONG TIME. This provides a perspective of how massage therapy has evolved over time as well as a platform for the future.

Opportunities for a shift in paradigm rarely occur, but I strongly believe the International Consortium on Manual Therapies is an important development.

It is important that the massage community does not ignore the impact of this interdisciplinary global collaboration among those who use manual therapy in professional practice.

Who founded the International Consortium of Manual Therapies?
Brian Degenhardt, DO, Paul Standley, PhD, and Francesco Cerritelli, PhD, DO(Europe) founded the ICMT after collaborating at several osteopathic manipulative medicine conferences. They surmised that to truly advance the manual therapy field both scientifically and clinically, the 20th-century silos between professions needed to be removed and communication and collaboration needed to be established.

To begin this process, they decided that fundamental yet critical issues needed to be overcome, such as variation in nomenclature systems within and across professions, and to build a platform to improve communication between clinicians and basic scientists. It is from this perspective that ICMT’s first conference program was developed.

Practitioners who provide manual therapy are encouraged to attend:

• Athletic trainers
• Chiropractors
• Doctors of Chiropractic
• Doctors of Oriental medicine
• Doctors of physical therapy
• Manual medicine physicians
• Massage therapists
• Occupational therapists
• Osteopaths
• Osteopathic physicians
• Physiatrists
• Physical therapists
• Structural Integration practitioners

Importantly, the scientific community will be involved supporting evidence informed practice and identifying gaps for future research design.

What makes this conference different? / Why should I attend?
The ICMT is interactive; in most conferences, participants just watch and listen to lectures but at ICMT, participants actively engage in the entire program. You will be working with respected colleagues and peers from across the many manual therapy disciplines to collaboratively discuss the latest insights into manual therapies and to help shape future collaboration and research.

Committed to delivering a groundbreaking conference to members of the manual therapy community, we have identified a new “virtual venue” for the ICMT Inaugural Conference. We are enthusiastic that under these circumstances, we will be able to better engage the manual therapy community in May 2022 and achieve the conference’s goals using this format.

The ICMT website is: https://www.icmtconference.org/

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