Do you treat muscles or bones?
It’s a question we hear fairly often at our Get Strong physiotherapy & osteopathy clinic in Kew. The answer is, we treat the person not solely muscles and bones. Osteopaths often have the reputation of just treating bones and physiotherapists have the reputation of just treating muscles. Neither are true, both professions treat the body as a whole, an ankle injury, headache, neck pain, or back pain, do not independently walk in on their own, you are part of the whole picture.
Muscles and bones have tons of pain receptors, all ready to send that lovely sensation of pain whenever they have been stimulated. Bone can be very painful, have you ever been kicked in the shin..? If you have, you will know exactly how painful it is.
Muscles are a bit more communicative in that they have more ways to feedback to you, if they are tired, thirsty, weak, tight, or stressed the receptors will send a signal to your brain and from your brain back again with a pain signal. When we say pain does not mean damage, it usually relates to this feedback system, which only has one language, and that is the language of pain.
Pain and owning a human body go hand in hand, without pain, something has probably gone amiss. Pain is something to listen to and learn from, it should not be feared or ignored. Not ignoring pain does not mean worrying or obsessing about it either, like everything else in life there is a balance. This is where we as physiotherapists and osteopaths can help, once we have cleared any serious injury or the possibility of disease we will look at your movement pattern for example how you move from the moment you walk into the clinic, to how you describe your symptoms; including your pain experience, injury history, and how you responded to it.
We treat you
Within the first 5 minutes of meeting you, we already have an idea of how you move, what body type you may have, what your pain levels are, how you respond to, and feel about pain. All of this information will be collated with movement tests, postural analysis and muscle and joint palpation. The information gathered is to discover your unique movement pattern, which we will work with, tweak, explore and improve.
Treatment consists of mobilisation and massage of joints and muscles, if protective patterns have been detected we will encourage you to move more freely by exploring some painful and stiff movements. Massage aims to improve movement and not just ‘polish skin’. Your movement pattern is something that you can work on throughout your life, all it takes is a bit of awareness, willingness to learn and to move. Your movement is your strength!