Three Types of Care – Chiropractic and Osteopathy
Our chiropractors and osteopaths are highly trained in diagnosing the cause of your symptoms, whether you are complaining of pain, pins and needles, lack of movement, numbness or a combination of all of them.
The correct diagnosis or cause of your symptoms is important to establish before treatment commences in order to provide you with the correct treatment management. Our practitioners will use a combination of physical assessment, clinical tests and orthopaedic tests and/ or combined with diagnostic imaging such as x-rays, ultrasound scans or MRI scans if deemed necessary.
When making a diagnosis the practitioner will be taking into consideration the reasons why you are experiencing the symptoms, for example why one side of the body is affected more than the other. They will assess your posture, looking for asymmetry and for muscle imbalances and weaknesses that can be addressed and corrected.
They will ask you questions about your day to day activity, sleeping pattern/ position and hobbies or personal interests in order to determine how this may be affecting your posture and therefore symptoms.
We want our patients to understand that pain is just a symptom of an underlying cause and that treating the underlying cause will prevent the symptom/s from returning.
The “Three Types of Care” chart demonstrates the progression of spinal health from the first time you visit it us with spinal related symptoms to being symptom free and with improved mechanical spinal health. Symptoms arising from dysfunction in the spine are varied and can be widespread, such as neck pain, back pain, muscle spasm, arm or leg pain with or without pins and needles, numbness or weakness.
Many patients consult our practitioners after an acute attack of back or neck pain. At this stage, your treatment will be focused on “Pain Management Care” and you can expect to be receiving this type of care twice a week until your symptoms improve. It is common to have good days and bad days during this period, with minor relapses as you try to increase your activity levels. As your pain level and relapses decrease so will the frequency of your visits to your practitioner, at which point the main focus of treatment is on restoring the health of your spine and muscles through “Functional Corrective Care”.
It is common for patients to stop coming for treatment at this stage as they are feeling symptom free and have returned to normal activity levels. However research has shown that 25% to 50% of people after an acute episode of back pain; will experience additional episode over the following year. It is therefore a recommendation that our patients continue with “Maintenance and Preventative Care” which may vary from one patient to the next on the frequency of the visits, dependent on their general spinal health, lifestyle and social factors. The aim is to try to space out the interval of your maintenance visits to once every 3 months. Of course how long you decide to benefit from chiropractic or osteopathic treatment is always up to you.
The treatment you may expect to receive during visits is varied and dependent on what your practitioner thinks is suitable for you at the time and of course what you feel comfortable with.
Pain Management Intensive Care:
- Cryotherapy or the use of cold packs
- Soft tissue work
- Intereferential therapy (minute electrical pulses used to treat pain and muscle spasm)
- Therapeutic ultrasound (to speed up healing and reduce inflammation)
- Dry needling (to reduce muscles spasm or tension)
- Spinal manipulative therapy or spinal mobilization
Functional Corrective Care:
- Soft tissue work
- Interferential Therapy
- Dry needling
- Spinal manipulative therapy or spinal mobilization
- Rehabilitation through a specific exercise program tailored to your condition. The NICE guidelines for low back pain recommend rehabilitation exercise for up to 8 sessions over 12 weeks.
Maintenance and Preventative Care:
- Soft tissue work
- Interferential Therapy
- Dry needling
- Spinal manipulative therapy or spinal mobilization