About Diane
Diane is a retired Physiotherapist who practiced for nearly 50 years and was a manual therapist for about 35. She started with a diploma in PT from the U. of Saskatchewan, in 1971, at age 20. In the 70s, she worked in hospitals and continued attending university because she liked learning everything. Her professional interest remained wanting to be a manual therapist, but this was delayed until the 80s. 

About manual therapy and Diane Jacobs
In the 80s, manual therapy suddenly became trendy - courses popped up everywhere, and she became swept up in a rush. Unfortunately, much of it was orthopedic manual therapy, which Diane wasn't very suited for, so she opted for immersion in the osteopathic slow kinds, mainly through the URSA Foundation (now closed),  a small but good manual therapy school in Edmunds, Wa. There she learned traditional treatment models with the usual biomechanical explanatory models. Diane opened a solo practice in Vancouver, made a decent living, paid off her mortgage, and happily helped hundreds of people with only her hands and brain and what she thought she "knew." 

Nervous system consideration
At the end of the nineties, David Butler, a PT from Australia, came to town to teach therapists about nerves, sensitivity in the nervous system, and pain mechanisms. Diane realized that this was likely what she had been treating all along - “We aren’t affecting tissue targets,” she thought. “Probably, we are unknowingly treating peripheral nerves the entire time.” Then, everything started to make a lot more sense. Diane hauled out anatomy books and started learning all the nerves. Butler's methods only really dealt with the deep nerve trunks - but there were scads of cutaneous nerves everywhere that no manual therapy teacher had ever mentioned! They were a lot longer, had more perilous routes through more body wall layers, and were much easier to access and figure out how to handle.

Dermoneuromodulation is born

By 2005, Diane had a name for all this - DermoNeuroModulation was born. In 2006, Diane, Angela Busch, and some other colleagues at U of S started a single-subject research project to study the method. Finally, in 2010 They presented the results to the profession at CPA Congress in St. John's Nfld.  

Meanwhile, one blank spot remained - she didn't understand how cutaneous nerves disseminated into the skin. In 2007 she convinced the people at the anatomy lab at UBC to allow her to find out. They agreed that this particular anatomy was not well-examined - the skin was usually removed and discarded, as was its neural content. Diane was provided with a specimen and taught to dissect it. She uncovered all the fascinating cutaneous rami of the medial, lateral and anterior arm, up into the axilla and down to the wrist. It was a watershed moment; visualizing the cutaneous rami in all their numerous physicality allowed her to understand how skin contact between the practitioner's hand and the patient's body could be woven into a new narrative of manual therapy. Diane gained a much deeper appreciation for the skin as a relatively thick organ and its role as a protector of the organism around which it is wrapped. She saw how the descriptive biomechanical language we have been taught was internally logical and provided a treatment scaffold on the one hand—on the other, mounted an irrelevant conceptual barrier from the perspective of the patient who cared only about having the painful movement experience addressed.

People started asking Diane to teach in 2007. Since then, she has created a treatment manual and then a book. In addition, she has written about the world of manual therapy from her perspective. Finally, she has agreed to teach DNM to physiotherapists and massage therapists, teaching across Canada and internationally in the US, Europe and Brazil. Some of these therapists now teach DNM to others around the world.

Other interests
In 2005, excited about the prospects of her profession taking on pain science and learning to work with people with new depths of understanding, She helped form a special interest group in Canada, PTs interested in pain science. Eventually, the Canadian Physiotherapy Association formally recognized our group as the Pain Science Division in 2008. Diane served as its communications liaison until 2014.  

Currently
Diane is now retired from practice and teaching.