Jo Abbott

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT JO ABBOTT

I am a clinical biomechanist, musculoskeletal researcher, and educator with a particular interest in how clinicians acquire and interpret information through hands-on assessment.My work explores a question that has long been debated in musculoskeletal healthcare: how reliable is palpation, and what exactly are clinicians perceiving when they assess the body through touch?During my doctoral research I examined this question through the lens of measurement science and clinician-reported outcome measurement. This work led to the development of HODA-A (Hands-On Data Acquisition & Analysis) — a framework that conceptualises hands-on assessment as a structured measurement process in which the clinician themselves forms part of the measurement instrument.A central theme of this work is the recognition that clinical perception is influenced by a web of determinants — factors such as fatigue, attention, sensory discrimination, and cognitive bias — which can influence what clinicians detect and how they interpret sensory information. Understanding and calibrating these influences is essential if hands-on assessment is to be meaningfully studied, taught, and applied in clinical practice.Alongside my research, I work clinically with people experiencing persistent musculoskeletal pain and movement disorders. My clinical work emphasises systems thinking, recognising that pain often emerges from interactions between movement patterns, breathing mechanics, nervous system regulation, and recovery capacity rather than from isolated structures.I am also the creator of Back Pain Systems, an educational platform designed to help people better understand and recover from back pain through movement, lifestyle, and nervous system awareness.Through teaching, writing, and clinical practice, my aim is to bridge the gap between research, clinical reasoning, and patient care — helping clinicians refine their perceptual skills while supporting people to better understand how their bodies move, adapt, and recover.I regularly share insights from clinical practice and research through my “Inside the Work of Dr Jo Abbott” series here on LinkedIn.