Dr Jo Abbott - PhD

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Dr Jo Abbott - PhD

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Whole-body care.

Clinical Biomechanist | Anatomist | Nutritionist | MSK Researcher
Founder of HODA-A™ — redefining hands-on MSK assessment
Creator of the Back Pain Systems™ App for lasting pain relief
Science-led.

31/10/2026

Intuition kept. Interrogated, not abandoned.

Fast recognition is one of the most valuable things an experienced clinician owns. It is also where experience can turn into bias without announcing itself. The answer isn't to give it up. It's to ask, every time, what would make it wrong.

HODA-A™ Level 1 teaches you to work this way. Cohort 4 begins the week of 30 November, and enrolment closes on Friday 20 November.

Enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · HODA-A™

30/10/2026

One programme. Three very different clinicians.

The benefit of HODA-A™ Level 1 isn't one message, because the starting problem is opposite at each end of a career.

If you've been in practice twenty or thirty years, your problem isn't sensitivity. It's that your skill has never been characterised, and experience sharpens detection and expectation bias at the same time. The question is usually "I've been doing this thirty years. What could this teach me?" The honest answer: nothing about your hands. Everything about the instrument behind them.

If you're a new graduate, you have no internal reference yet, and you've been taught not to trust the one you're building. You ask whether you should master the basics first. This is the basics: the layer under every technique you are about to learn.

If you're somewhere in the middle, competent and busy, CPD has probably become technique collection. You don't have time for another course. Level 1 uses the methods you already own, so there is nothing new to fit in alongside them.

In their own words:

"After 30 years as a hands-on therapist, I can honestly say this is the most impactful course I've ever done." Teresa, New Zealand

"I am the instrument, and my hands are data collectors, not only tools to deliver a 'treatment.'" Miriam, graduate sport rehabilitator, London

Which one are you?

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November.

Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/
15-minute call: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · Founder, HODA-A™

29/10/2026

Your hands knew first. Then what?

Most experienced clinicians have had the moment. You touch, and you know, before you could say why.

The profession keeps asking us to choose between that intuition and the evidence. HODA-A™ refuses the choice. In MT6, Intuition and Pattern Literacy, you keep the fast recognition, then immediately ask what would make it wrong.

So I'd love to hear yours. Tell me about a time your hands knew something before you could explain it. Was it right, and how did you find out?

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November, and enrolment closes on Friday 20 November.

Enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · HODA-A™

29/10/2026

What happens when you take the variables out one at a time?

That was the question behind my doctoral studies: eight experiments, 159 manual therapists, and one familiar clinical judgement, leg length.

In normal practice, leg-length judgements were correct 47% of the time. With parallax controlled, 54%. With eye dominance added, 57%. In a replication with eight testers, 77%.

Against Vicon motion capture, one calibrated examiner agreed on pelvic position in 13 of 14 trials.

These are pilot-scale findings, and I say so every time I present them. They do not show that any course makes clinicians reliable. What they do show is that the variables are real, they are measurable, and controlling them changed the result.

That is why HODA-A™ Level 1 now opens with a lecture on these studies, before the first measurement theory. Everything after it is built on what they found.

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November.

Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/
15-minute call: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · Founder, HODA-A™

28/10/2026

What changes on Monday morning.

Each module of HODA-A™ Level 1 is one measurement theory, followed by its calibration labs. Swipe for what each one changes in clinic, and why it matters.

One of my favourites is MT1, Interoception. Your own state is the zero point you measure the patient against, so cold hands read every patient as warm.

None of this replaces the methods you already use. It examines the measurement process underneath them.

Which of these would change your Monday most?

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November so that calibration kits reach you in time.

Enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/
15-minute call: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · HODA-A™

28/10/2026

Every clinical finding you have ever produced passed through one instrument: you.

Nobody has ever checked it.

HODA-A™ Level 1 is sixteen mentored weeks of checking it.

I've been asked more than once what, exactly, a clinician gets from Level 1. It's a fair question, so here is the plain version.

What you are not buying: another technique to add to the pile, an online palpation course, or a replacement for the assessment methods you already use. You bring your own methods. Level 1 examines the measurement process underneath them.

Level 1 does not set out to make you more accurate. It teaches you how the instrument works: what changes the signal before it reaches your hands, between your hands and your brain, and between perception and interpretation. Accuracy is tested later, face to face, at Level 2.

As I put it to every cohort: how do you test a braking system if you don't know how the braking system works?

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November so that calibration kits can be posted in time.

Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/
If you have questions first, book 15 minutes with me here: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · Founder, HODA-A™

24/10/2026

At this week's lecture, someone asked for a defence they could use with colleagues who say hands-on care has no place. Here it is, in one sentence.

I do not claim my hands are reliable. I claim that I measure under stated conditions, report my findings with their uncertainty, and calibrate my instrument against a known reference. Then I ask the person challenging me to do the same.

Nobody objects to a measurement reported with its uncertainty. What the profession objects to, rightly, is certainty that has not earned itself.

HODA-A™ Level 1 teaches you to work this way. Cohort 4 begins the week of 30 November, and enrolment closes on Friday 20 November. Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · HODA-A™

23/10/2026

Peer reviewed is the start, not the finish.

This month my paper with Chuck Hazle and Neil Tuttle was published in Physiotherapy Theory and Practice. It is a theoretical framework that applies COSMIN to hands-on assessment. It argues that hands-on assessment is measurement and that the clinician is the instrument.

To be clear about what it is: a framework does not show that anything improves reliability. It sets out how that should be tested and in what order. Define what you are measuring, check content validity, stabilise and calibrate the instrument, then test.

So the work continues.

On Wednesday 4 November I present the research in Porto, at the 12th World Congress on Low Back and Pelvic Girdle Pain, with my co-authors Penny Hudson and Jason Lake.

Paper two is under way with the same three of us. This time it covers the within-tester work: whether one clinician, measuring under stated conditions, gets the same answer twice.

Gold standard is earned, not assumed.

If you would like a copy of the paper for your own study, message me. The abstract is free: https://doi.org/10.1080/09593985.2026.2743102

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · Founder, HODA-A™

22/10/2026

Six myths the room named.

When clinicians booked this week's free HODA-A™ Lecture, I asked which myth about manual therapy they would most like to reframe. They came from five countries and named six.

Two therapists can't feel the same. We need an RCT to prove it works. It makes patients dependent. Manual release has no benefit. Fixing the body. Only treat the painful area.

Swipe for the framework's answer to each.

What links all six: they are arguments about treatment. None of them is an argument about assessment. Assessment comes first, and when we touch, the question is whether we are measuring anything and how we would know.

That doesn't make hands-on automatically right. Not all hands-on is valid or reliable. Within a defined protocol it can be measured, and that is the work.

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November so that calibration kits reach you in time. Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/

Questions first? Book a free 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Which myth would you add?

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · HODA-A™

21/10/2026

At eight o'clock yesterday morning UK time, I gave the free HODA-A™ Lecture to clinicians in Colombia, India, New Zealand, Austria and the UK.

For some of them it was the middle of the night, and for others it was the end of their working day. Everyone came for the same reason.

When they booked, each person answered ten questions, and I built the hour from their answers. Their answers had very different starting points. Some trained with Barral or in craniosacral work, and some were self-taught. Their confidence in the evidence ranged from "very confident" to "low to moderate".

Underneath all ten questions was one question: how do you know when to trust what you see, feel and perceive?

That is the question HODA-A™ is built around. Hands-on assessment is measurement, and the clinician is the instrument. Before we test reliability, we must stabilise the instrument.

We played three short games. One was scoring the state of the instrument before it measures anything else. Another, crossing two fingers, showed that touch is a construction rather than a read-out. Then the clock beat us, so I have written up every question I didn't reach for everyone who came.

Thank you to everyone who gave up an hour, and in some cases their sleep.

HODA-A™ Level 1, Cohort 4, begins the week of 30 November. Enrolment closes on Friday 20 November so that calibration kits can be posted in time. If you'd like to talk it through first, book a free 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/drjoabbott/hoda-a-level-1-15-minute-fit-call

Dates, fee and enrolment: https://drjoabbott.com/course/hoda-a-level-1-perceptual-calibration-certification/

Dr Jo Abbott, PhD · Founder, HODA-A™

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Poole

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http://www.drjoabbott.com/

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