Sean Gibbons
BSc (Hons) RPT,
MSc Ergonomics, PhD(c)
Stability Physiotherapy
Physiotherapist
SMARTERehab
Research Director
Lecturer
Professional Speaker
McMaster University
Assistant Clinical Professor
(Adjunct) Advanced Orthopaedic Musculoskeletal / Manipulative Physiotherapy Specialization
Sean Gibbons graduated from Manchester University in 1995. He a clinician who does part time research. He is known internationally for making the complexity of musculoskeletal pain easier by putting it into bite size actionable interventions with usable clinical reasoning strategies. Sean has been rehabilitating motor behavior his whole career and has significantly contributed to the development of the area. He has dedicated his career to making the assessment and rehabilitation process better.
Some examples of how he has added to the field of rehabilitation:
- Problem: Some people have extremely poor coordination and cannot learn motor control based interventions
- Solution: Identification of a subgroup of patients with poor motor skill learning ability and the development of the Motor Control Abilities Questionnaire©.
Development of new interventions for this group (e.g. primitive reflex inhibition, postural reflex facilitation, motor imagery rehabilitation)
- Problem: not all patients with extreme atypical pain patterns have central sensitization
- Solution: identification of a subgroup of patients with body imagery pain who do not have central sensitization.
Development of a new assessment protocol and rehabilitation strategies for motor imagery
- Problem: some people do not respond to any therapy very well
- Solution: Identification of a subgroup if patients with Neuro-Immune-Sympathetic-Endocrine dys-regulation and the development of the NICE-Q© to screen for low grade systemic inflammation
This group requires medical and / or a comprehensive lifestyle management approach
His PhD was on the development of a questionnaire to predict motor skill learning in low back pain. This provides insight into who will respond to specific motor control exercises. It has been used in two clinical trials, which favored the experimental group.
Sean continues to work clinically and in the lab with the goal of making the rehabilitation process better. Despite that he is known for motor control and movement based interventions, his current research is on understanding why resistance training may help in chronic pain. He is also researching the influence of past asymptomatic injuries away from the area of current pain, on exercise response and minor cranial nerve injury in WAD and concussion. Sean is collaborating with others on projects related to low grade systemic inflammation, central sensitization and the affect of primitive reflex inhibition on movement patterns and other aspects of motor behavior.
He is a regular presenter at national and international conferences and has several journal publications and book chapters on related topics. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor (Adjunct) at McMaster’s Advanced Orthopaedic Musculoskeletal / Manipulative Physiotherapy specialization and provides continuing education courses internationally.