Print Edition: Introduction to the History of PAK Around the World, Part 2

Part 2 of this history of Professional Applied Kinesiology’s (PAK) growth around the world tells the story of PAK’s spread on each of the continents of the world and its penetration into nearly all of the allied natural health care fields. Clinicians from the various disciplines of manual medicine, acupuncture, osteopathy, naturopathy, physiotherapy, dentistry, psychology, nutrition, and massage will tell the story of the growth of PAK manual muscle testing within their professions, and the reasons and dynamics for its appeal to their members. The history of PAK’s success in sports medicine is documented here.

Chiropractic, dental, osteopathic, naturopathic, nutrition, and massage colleges have all adopted part of the PAK curriculum and taught it to their students around the world. The reason for this, it will be discovered, is that PAK can be used with most methods of health care practice and can be the unifying factor in finding the best method of treatment among the vast amount of treatment options available today. PAK is a system of examination that evaluates normal and abnormal body function and helps bring together the many forms of complementary therapeutics.

Over time many therapeutic procedures from different disciplines have been found that returned an inhibited muscle to normal status. Because of this success, PAK has become an interdisciplinary examination approach in health care, drawing together the core elements of complementary therapies and creating a more unified approach to the diagnosis and treatment of functional illness.

Dr. George J. Goodheart Jr., the founder of PAK, showed that the muscle system was the most exposed part of the nervous system. Diagnosing neuromuscular problems with muscle testing has proven to offer a great appeal to clinicians across the globe, as evidenced by the fact that there are today an estimated 1 million clinicians who use some or all of Goodheart’s PAK method.

Growing from Goodheart’s initial published work throughout the chiropractic and biomedical literature of the time, there are now some 40 published textbooks in seven languages about PAK, and a dozen more textbooks that contain chapters specifically covering PAK. The history we’ve written here covers the intimate hows and whys of a single chiropractic diagnostic technique’s spread around the world and answers the questions about why it been taken up by physicians from a great number of allied disciplines.