Functional and Kinetic Treatment

An Interview with Dr. Todd Riddle

How are you a pioneer in this field?

Dr. Riddle: I have to give credit to the people that came before me. Without those foundations I wouldn’t have that to stand on. I’m affiliated with FAKTR along with Dr. Tom Hyde and Dr. Greg Doerr.

When you take something like traditional IASTM and you add movement to it they got accelerated outcomes.

What we’re doing is taking your traditional IASTM courses and trying to make it more of a system as opposed to a technique, because if you’re focused strictly on techniques that’s all you’ve got, but if you develop a system now it’s for everybody.

I like to do what works and I try to be as evidence-informed about that as possible.

Noah: What is the unique to the lens that you look through?

Dr. Riddle: Patients don’t lie about what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they just forget or they don’t know how to articulate it. One of the windows into what’s going on with the patient is the way that they move and they can’t lie. Especially if you know how to take those movements and have them perform them in a controlled manner. It’s a better idea to figure out exactly what’s going on with them without actually having to ask them questions.

What I find is when you take them through a movement assessment it stimulates more questions that you may not have thought to ask. These assessments fall under scrutiny for their validity and I don’t try to use them from an injury prevention standpoint, but I do get a great baseline. If there’s something from that information you can glean to improve their outcomes then that’s what I’m going to get for it.

Noah: What are you seeing in the performance and Rehab world that’s moving in that direction towards validating functional assessment?

Dr. Todd Riddle: It’s not just about the rehab program itself because if you’re thinking that everything that you’re doing for that patient from a pathological and anatomical standpoint you’re missing a much larger picture.

Before I go any further with the bio-mechanical assessment I think it’s worth mentioning that we are treating people, we’re not treating conditions.
Each one of those people come to us with a different background. They are the whole person. If we’re going to look at the bio-mechanical side we also have to look at what’s going on in their life that may be driving this problem because it may not be a bio-mechanical issue at all. It could be that their mother just died or they lost their job or something awful has happened.

You find many practitioners who use SFMA and FMS to get a bettor idea of what’s going on with patients and that’s not to say that Neuro testing and orthopedic testing isn’t useful, but if we’re depending upon those then I think we’re missing a bigger clinical picture.

The assessment includes a movement assessment, orthopedic testing, neuro-testing, and a psychological evaluation.

Noah: What are some of the tools of your clinical practice?

Dr. Todd Riddle: I rely heavily on the FAKTR protocol and I’m blessed to work at Texas Chiropractic College and I get to focus very heavily on the rehab side.
It’s a team approach and I get to work in the sweet spot, which is rehab.
From a rehab standpoint I get to focus on the patho-anatomical and the bio-mechanical. My entire job is to get somebody out of pain as quickly as possible and to improve function as quickly as possible.

Whether that’s using instruments, cupping, decompression, hands-on approach, or exercise. I wish I could say that I have this magical bullet for that one thing that works and you know that there is no such thing. Refine this one tool that you have mastered and have been able to offer a large number of people.

Noah: How did you get into FAKTR.

Dr. Riddle: Initially I was hoping for physical therapy. I had a football scholarship and majored in kinesio therapy and after I graduated I worked in a rehab clinic at the University and realized that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go.

I threw myself into doing sports performance along with rehabilitation and I got introduced to Dr. Hyde and he became my mentor and eventually I started teaching for FAKTR.

See the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=g8uj_ccpxqo