DermoNeuroModulating (DNM) is not a modality, but an approach to manual therapy that provides the therapist with tools to interact with their client. DNM provides a less wrong explanatory model of how manual therapy works, while offering to our clients (human and other mammals) a different narrative and gentle style of touch that allows for greater agency, self-efficacy, and management of clients’ symptoms and issues.
As an explanatory model of manual therapy, DNM encourages the therapist to think compassionately about the client’s ENTIRE nervous system. It is a structured interactive approach to manual therapy that considers the nervous system of the human from skin cell to sense of self. This approach, using DNM techniques or your own manual therapy techniques with a DNM approach, will decrease peripheral nociceptive input, increase parasympathetic tone, and build self-efficacy. This can further result in new output from one’s nervous system including: less sympathetic arousal, less anxiety, less pain, less tension, greater ease of movement, more ROM, refined body schema, better self-regulation, enhanced perception of self within one's own physicality.