WEBINAR: Is Low Back Pain Really Non-specific?
A challenge to an old dogma

Mark Laslett is a New Zealand Board Registered Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy Specialist (NZRPS), based in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is a former manipulative therapy instructor for the New Zealand Manipulative Physiotherapists Association and AUT University, and a former international instructor for the McKenzie Institute International. He completed his PhD from Linköping University (Sweden) in 2005, which was based on his clinical research on the diagnostic accuracy of the clinical examination of patients with chronic low back pain. He has been a tutor in biostatistics and study design for AUT University, a supervisor for doctoral students undertaking diagnostic accuracy research and he remains an Adjunct Research Fellow for AUT University. Mark has about 40 scientific publications, many of which relate to diagnosis and management of low back pain. His book “Mechanical Diagnosis & Therapy: The Upper Limb” was published in 1996 and is now out of print.

Mark was the first physiotherapist to be Board registered as a clinical specialist in New Zealand (2014). He is an honorary life member of the New Zealand Manipulative Therapists Association, Physiotherapy New Zealand, and the Swedish branch of the McKenzie Institute.

Mark currently sees patients mostly with persistent spinal pain and is active as a triage consultant for the Canterbury Initiative Low Back Pain Health Pathway until 2020. In 2015 he co-founded “Southern Musculoskeletal Seminars” with Dr Angela Cadogan, and together they provide online structured education courses for clinicians on musculoskeletal diagnostics. His advanced 0online course “Diagnosis of Persistent Low Back & Referred Lower Extremity Pain” has been running since early 2016 and is now available in the French and Spanish languages. He has published new courses, "The Science of Diagnostic Accuracy", and a Case Study course in 2020. Later in 2020 he will publish a shorter course of the basics of back pain management for recent physiotherapy and medical practitioners.