The History of McTimoney Chiropractic

McTimoney Chiropractic was developed by John McTimoney, a British chiropractor from Oxfordshire. As a youth, John McTimoney’s ambition was to be jewellery maker but after he fell from a ladder while doing farm work, he began to lose the use of both arms and had difficulty walking. Over three years of chiropractic treatments, he regained his health and became enthusiastic about becoming a Chiropractor himself.

At that time, around 1949, there were no chiropractic colleges in Britain, so  John McTimoney studied under Dr Mary Walker who had travelled to America in the 1930s to learn chiropractic from BJ Palmer, the founder of chiropractic’s son.

John McTimoney developed his treatment to become a distinctive approach. In his quest for an effective, natural and non-invasive treatment, he devised a holistic chiropractic method that uses the sense of touch to analyse a patient’s entire skeleton in order to detect misalignments, however slight. Applying engineering principles to this detailed examination of the skeletal structure, he refined the process of choosing and making skilful adjustments to allow the patient’s structure to normalise. Because his method was less vigorous than that used by many other chiropractors, it could be used on patients of all ages. He is also believed to be the first chiropractor to adapt chiropractic techniques for use on animals in 1954.

In 1972, after 20 years’ experience in practice, he founded the Oxfordshire School of Chiropractic which became the McTimoney College of Chiropractic. Today, this college is one of only three in the UK offering recognised chiropractic qualifications.