Conference Report ICMD

The Third International Conference on Movement Dysfunction, Edinburgh,  was held on October 30 to November 1 2009

Since the first ICMD in 2001 There has been growing world interest in understanding Movement Dysfunction as a key feature in the risk of injury, actual injury, disablement (including limiters of performance) and rehabilitation.  This 3rd ICMD was summarised at the conferences end, from the podium, as the ‘Best yet,’ and it truly was a good conference.

Over 600 delegates from nearly 50 countries listened with keen interest to the keynote lecturers, the guest presenters, the research paper presentations, and the poster displays over the 3 days of a rather wet but welcoming Edinburgh autumnal weekend.

Mark Comerford was a guest speaker - Recurrence of injury and pain in sport - What's missing.

He pointed out that current assessment strategies look at history of previous injury, joint range, muscle strength and muscle extensibility but it is only history that has any predictive legitimacy. So what are we not looking for? Comerford suggested that assessing the function of the body under real situations is important and that looking at identifying uncontrolled movements, where they occur and in what direction, and classifying them as to whether the uncontrolled motion occurs under low threshold or high threshold activities. Performance Stability launched their new online tool using this system developed by Comerford and Mottram at the conference.  Performance Stability tool can identify the threshold at which the uncontrolled movement occurs. Interestingly the tests can show failures in low threshold movements (postural loads) that don’t appear in the same movement under higher threshold testing and vice versa -allowing a more targeted intervention.