Tedd Koren

Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania

Tedd Koren built a publishing house before he built a technique

Koren directed the Philadelphia Chiropractic Health Center on Chestnut Street from 1977 to 1991, a multidisciplinary clinic running chiropractic alongside psychotherapy, acupuncture and massage. He had taken a Doctor of Chiropractic at Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic in Spartanburg, South Carolina in March 1977, magna cum laude and class valedictorian. A Bachelor of Arts in communications from the University of Miami came first, in June 1972. In 1991 he moved the practice to Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania and has kept it small since (his curriculum vitae).

Koren co-founded the Pennsylvania College of Straight Chiropractic in 1978

The college opened in Horsham in 1978 as the only chiropractic school in Pennsylvania. Koren taught histology, neurology and adjusting technique on its original faculty through 1980, and he sat on its Founder's Advisory Board until 1992. The college held candidate status with the Straight Chiropractic Academic Standards Association and ceased operations in 1992. A semiannual scholarship for the best student paper on the science of chiropractic has carried his name at Life Chiropractic College since 1991.

Koren Publications has distributed more than one hundred million patient brochures

Koren founded Koren Publications in Hatfield, Pennsylvania in 1987, after seven years writing a patient health series for Blessing Publications in Philadelphia. The brochure series covers more than sixty chiropractic topics and is published under license in Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom. Koren Wellness puts the running total past one hundred million pieces. His curriculum vitae calls it the most popular patient education series in the profession.

Koren hosted a weekly health show on commercial radio in Philadelphia

Koren ran a two-hour call-in show called Holistic Hotline on WDVT 900 AM from 1986 to 1987, broadcast across the Delaware Valley. His curriculum vitae records it as the first such show hosted by a Doctor of Chiropractic. He served as division editor of the International Journal of Psychosomatics from 1986 to 1988. He has sat on the editorial boards of six other journals since.

Koren still teaches Koren Specific Technique himself

The 2026 seminar calendar lists a Koren Specific Technique foundation and workshop in Marietta, Georgia on August 28 to 30 and in Phoenix on October 9 to 11 (korenspecifictechnique.com). Koren has been extension faculty at Life University since 1995. He taught at the Shiokawa School of Chiropractic in Tokyo from 1995 to 1998 and at Palmer from 1997 to 2005. He has run seminars in ten countries.

Brooklyn

Koren's own account of how he reached chiropractic starts with a house call after an injection went wrong

Koren grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of four brothers, in a household that reached for a grandmother's remedies before it reached for a doctor (Koren Wellness). At nine he was diagnosed with walking pneumonia. The family physician gave him an injection that struck the sciatic nerve, and by the second visit he could not stand without pulling himself up on a dresser. His grandmother threw the doctor out and called the neighborhood chiropractor.

The chiropractor got him walking, and Koren chose that school over medicine

Koren records that he could walk without pain after the chiropractor's first visit and that the pneumonia cleared after the second. He was seven when he had measles, and he took a penicillin shot afterward that produced an allergic reaction serious enough for the physician to warn against a second dose. Those two episodes are the whole of the medical history he tells. He went to chiropractic school rather than medical school.

Koren trained in straight chiropractic and has never left that position

Koren entered Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic and graduated in 1977. The school held that correcting the subluxation is the whole of the work and that no condition is being treated. Koren absorbed that position and has held it since. His later move away from upper cervical exclusivity changed his method and not his philosophy. He still describes the work as empirical and vitalistic.

The injury

Koren Specific Technique began with a falling cabinet and ten years of failed care

A tall laminate cabinet stood on its side in Koren's house after a move. He closed a door and it came down on him. He took a concussion and nearly lost three fingers, and within days the use of his hands began to go (Koren's own account). He was already carrying a lumbosacral disc complaint of twenty-five years or more, with sciatica bad enough that he could not walk ten feet without stopping.

Roughly forty to fifty practitioners saw him over about ten years

Chiropractors across the United States and Canada adjusted him. By his own count he spent about a decade and saw forty to fifty practitioners. Nothing resolved the disc complaint completely, and he expected to need surgery. He had access to the profession's senior practitioners. The access did not help.

Koren ordered the instruments and started working on his own body

The turn came in Key Biscayne, Florida, where a colleague named Alan Creed used adjusting instruments on him. Koren ordered the equipment and began working on his own body. He dates the result to late 2003, and his curriculum vitae carries Koren Specific Technique from 2003 onward. He adjusted his wife in November 2003 for migraines she had carried since 1991, and the first correction held six weeks.

Koren withheld the method for more than a year before teaching it

For over a year Koren adjusted chiropractors at his own philosophy seminars and told them nothing about how he was doing it. The first unplanned demonstration came at the McTimoney College of Chiropractic in Abingdon, England, where he had two full days of lecture time. The first formal seminar followed at the end of May 2005. He named it Koren Specific Technique last, after several candidates.

Ward's finding

The occipital drop is Lowell Ward's, and Koren credits him for it every time he teaches it

Lowell Ward practiced in Long Beach, California and coined the term occipital drop inside a system he called Spinal Column Stressology (Dynamic Chiropractic on Lowell Ward). Ward used it as a binary device, and his analysis recorded forty measurements of spinal landmarks for each patient. Koren took the finding whole and credits Ward for it. Attribution is the first thing he teaches about the indicator.

Koren worked inside Ward's system for sixteen years before he built anything

Spinal Stress Seminars of Long Beach certified Koren in Spinal Column Stressology in 1987, and he taught at their Homecoming Seminar the following year (his curriculum vitae). He joined the International College of Spinal Column Stressology in 1988. That is roughly sixteen years of familiarity with Ward's work before Koren Specific Technique existed. By his own account he read close to a thousand sets of Ward's standing and seated films while studying there.

Ward's seated radiographs are where the posture argument comes from

Ward had a patient whose sciatic pain appeared only when she sat. Her standing radiograph looked unremarkable, so he broke his own routine and filmed her seated. The seated film showed reversed curves. Ward went on to make that standing against seated comparison on more than a thousand patients. Koren inherited the conclusion and built an examination around it.

Koren Specific Technique is a declared assembly of three existing parts

The method runs three steps that Koren calls the three Cs: challenge, check and correct. He names the source of each rather than claiming originality. The challenge procedure comes from Directional Non-Force Technique and its founder Richard Van Rumpt. The occipital drop and the posture work come from Ward. The correction comes from a multi-thrust instrument he did not build. Every part came from somewhere else, and the assembly is his. He insists the result is an analysis protocol rather than a technique, because the correction can be delivered by any means the practitioner already has.

Koren's addition was an indicator that costs nothing to check

An indicator muscle tires, so Applied Kinesiology spends a contraction on every question and its readings degrade across a long session. A leg check needs a patient lying prone. The occipital drop loads no muscle and needs only the back of the head, so nothing fatigues and the check survives any posture the patient can hold. Koren holds that it can be run dozens of times a minute.

Posture

Koren examines the patient in the posture where the problem happens, and he calls it the posture of subluxation

Koren Specific Technique runs its whole analysis in the position the patient is complaining about. Koren's term is the posture of subluxation, and he states the claim without qualification. A subluxation present in one posture may not exist in another. His official description names four valid positions for the whole loop: standing, sitting, lying and the position of injury. People are rarely hurt lying flat, so an examination taken flat is reading a state the patient does not live in.

The postures Koren teaches are ordinary and specific

Bending forward or back, crossing the legs, a foot up on a chair. Climbing the small step stool he keeps in the office. Sitting on a motorcycle, holding a guitar, or moving through a golf swing one frame at a time until the drop appears. He tells patients to make it hurt before they come in. He also asks the body which posture is the right one to examine.

Koren extends posture to emotional and cognitive states

A patient cleared in the office can think about a divorce or a car crash and present new findings within seconds. Koren checks and corrects while the patient holds the thought. He credits Scott Walker, founder of Neuro-Emotional Technique, with establishing that an emotional memory reproduces a physical pattern. Where the trouble shows up while reading, the book stays in the patient's hands during the check.

Upright imaging finds what a supine film does not

Weishaupt and colleagues imaged thirty patients with chronic low back pain in a positional scanner (Radiology 2000). They compared supine images against seated flexion and seated extension across 152 nerve roots. Nerve root contact rose from 34 instances supine to 62 in seated flexion. Deviation went from 10 supine to 13 in seated extension. Compression appeared in one patient, and only when that patient sat in extension. The posture Koren examines in is the posture the finding shows up in.

Disc pressure is five times higher standing than lying down

Wilke and colleagues telemetered pressure from a transducer placed in the L4 to L5 nucleus of a volunteer (Spine 1999). They recorded 0.10 megapascals lying supine against 0.50 relaxed standing and 0.46 sitting unsupported. Standing bent forward reached 1.10, and lifting 20 kilograms with a rounded back reached 2.30. The spine Koren examines standing is carrying five times the load of the spine on the table.

1992

Koren published on posture and personality thirteen years before he taught Koren Specific Technique

Koren and E. Rosenwinkel ran forty chiropractic patients through four radiographs each plus the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Int J Psychosom 1992;39(1-4):10-17). They built general linear models predicting personality measures from spinal and postural measures, and several models reached significance. The abstract asks whether changing posture can affect personality, and whether emotional states can alter posture. That is the question Koren Specific Technique would be built to ask at the chair.

Koren edited the journal that later published him

Koren served as a division editor at the International Journal of Psychosomatics from 1986 to 1988, four years before the paper ran there. The first Koren Specific Technique seminar followed in May 2005. The posture and emotion pairing was in his written work long before it became an examination procedure.

Koren wrote for a general medical readership in 1999

Koren published a paper called Chiropractic in the journal Science & Medicine, in its September and October 1999 issue, volume six, number five. His curriculum vitae describes it as the first paper on chiropractic to appear in a major medical journal. He followed it with Chiropractic: An Introduction in Frontier Perspectives in spring 2000, published by the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University. He has been a member of that center since 1990.

The FTC file

The Federal Trade Commission investigated Koren Publications for six years and closed the file in 2001

On January 10, 1995 Koren received a seven-page letter from a senior Federal Trade Commission attorney asking him to substantiate 21 representations made in his chiropractic brochures (Dynamic Chiropractic, 1998). The letter asked for every document supporting the claims and every document tending to contradict them. Koren sent packages carrying nearly 400 references. He then retained counsel, and the matter ran for six years.

Koren signed a negotiated agreement in 1997 and the commissioners rejected it

The 1997 agreement required that some brochures be rewritten to take less aggressive positions where the research was limited. Koren signed it and it went to the commissioners for ratification. Months passed and the commissioners rejected it. A new complaint and order reached his attorneys on April 26, 1998. It named four brochures covering respiratory disease, children and immunization. Three were still at issue when the file closed.

Koren's attorneys argued the case as a free speech question

Koren's attorneys were James Turner and colleagues at the Washington firm of Swankin and Turner (Dynamic Chiropractic, 2001). The Commission's theory was that a chiropractor writing about vaccination or pediatric care faced a higher standard of review than an unlicensed journalist writing the same words. Koren's team attacked that theory directly, and the International Chiropractors Association backed him publicly.

The Commission closed the investigation on June 19, 2001

Federal Trade Commission attorneys wrote to Koren's counsel on June 19, 2001 to say they had closed the investigation. No enforcement action followed and no charges were brought. The letter noted that closing an investigation is not a determination that no violation occurred, just as its pendency was not a determination that one had. Three of nearly one hundred pamphlets had been in dispute at the end.

Koren founded the Foundation for Health Choice the following year

Koren has been co-founder and president of the Foundation for Health Choice since 2002. The foundation takes up patient rights to information and redress in healthcare, and the free speech rights of health educators. He describes the whole episode as standing up to the federal government on behalf of the profession. He has run the foundation alongside the publishing house since.

Koren and the model

Koren made the question cheap, and the Unified Model of Tone says why a cheap question changes what you can find

Every analytical method in chiropractic asks the body something. The cost of asking decides how the rest of the method is built. Koren's occipital drop loads no muscle and holds the patient in no fixed position. The check can therefore be run hundreds of times in a visit, and run while the patient carries weight. The Unified Model of Tone makes both properties consequential.

A binary question that fatigues nothing turns an examination into a search

A muscle test spends a contraction each time it is used, so a practitioner rations questions and runs a survey. A check that costs nothing can be run as a search instead, doubling back and re-asking. Koren teaches no fixed route through the body. The order of correction is set by the drop rather than by a scan, and each visit re-asks the question instead of repeating the last visit's list.

The occipital drop is read over muscles packed with spindles

Kulkarni and colleagues counted muscle spindles in the suboccipital muscles of human fetuses (Neurol India 2001). They found 242 per gram in obliquus capitis inferior. Obliquus capitis superior held 190 and the rectus capitis posterior muscles 98. Peck, Buxton and Nitz had proposed in 1984 that a small muscle paired with a much larger one works as a monitor rather than a mover (J Morphol 1984). Small muscles paired with large ones report position rather than produce it, which is the anatomy set out at muscle spindles and proprioception.

Load is part of tone, so a supine patient is a different system

What an input does depends on the state receiving it, and load is a foundation of tone rather than a background condition. Disc pressure runs five times higher standing than supine. Heart rate rises by roughly thirty beats per minute from supine to standing, measured across 175 women and 176 men (Int J Cardiol 2019). Load changes what an input does, which is the argument at load and heart rate variability.

Koren's posture claim is a state-dependence claim in clinical language

A finding taken supine reports a different state. The state the patient lives in is the one they walk out in. The model also holds that the body localizes itself by moving and cannot form an accurate map holding still. Putting a patient back on the step stool restores the load and the movement that generate the signal. A still patient reports a smaller map, which is the case made at movement.

The ArthroStim trades force for repetition at 12 to 14 thrusts a second

Koren corrects with an ArthroStim, built by IMPAC of Salem, Oregon, which fires 12 to 14 high-velocity thrusts per second across four settings. The instrument cleared the 510(k) pathway on July 15, 1994 under number K930431, which establishes substantial equivalence rather than approval. The instrument removes almost all the magnitude and replaces it with repetition. The Activator Method delivers a single impulse instead. Correspondence between an input and the pattern a body is holding decides the result, and that claim sits at input quality.

The model names the mechanism Koren leaves open

Koren is explicit that Koren Specific Technique is empirical, that the body is asked rather than reasoned about, and that the mechanism may never be fully known. The model names the mechanism. Tone is the organizing state the nervous system holds across mechanical tension, excitability, autonomic regulation and sensory gain. Tone inside its healthy range is health, because that range preserves the ability to adapt to load. Tone that drifts outside it is what shows up as illness.

Where Tedd Koren sits in this library

Koren Specific Technique sets out the three-step loop, the postures and the instrument in full. Richard Van Rumpt built the challenge Koren runs inside Directional Non-Force Technique, and he spent fifteen years in Sacro-Occipital Technique before that. Neuro-Emotional Technique supplies the emotional half of the posture concept.