So you have neck pain or back pain and you have tried a few different things that simply haven’t worked. What else can you try?
We know that the pain in your neck, upper and mid back and along the shoulders is irritating and distracting – sometimes causing aching pain and discomfort between the shoulder blades, either side of the spine, up the neck and into the back of the head and even down towards the lower back. The pain can increase as the day goes on, making you feel like you want to crawl out of your body to get away from it, affecting your ability to comfortably work, study, cook, sleep and carry out your daily tasks. These symptoms can greatly affect your everyday life, becoming tiring and restricting. In simple terms, it’s debilitating.
At Thrive Health Co. our Myotherapists see many clients with neck and back pain.
Common conditions and complaints we see regularly and treat can include:
– Pain and tightness across the shoulders, between the shoulder blades and up the neck
– Pain from across the top of the shoulders, neck and into the back of the head, sometimes accompanied with dull aching headaches
– Feeling of stiffness and restricted range of movement in the upper back and neck
– Postural changes with rounded shoulders and stiffness in the upper back
We know that holding certain postures over time can start to create a lack of blood flow and oxygenation into our muscles in addition to possibly lengthening and weakening muscles, causing them to work harder than they are comfortable with and therefore causing that aching pain as the day goes on. This situation starts to create a perfect storm for your upper back and neck where muscles feel tight and joints become stiff as they deal with the load placed on them, you may then start to avoid exercises and movement due to the discomfort. The key to a long-term fix of these issues is symptom relief through hands on, targeted treatment, understanding what movements are good for your upper back and neck, along with improving the mobility, stability and strength of the painful and related areas.
In your initial session we will have a chat with you about your symptoms to understand when you feel them, what makes it worse and if you know what makes it better. We do a thorough assessment, including feeling the affected areas to get a sense of tissue changes, movement assessment of the affected and surrounding joints, muscles, ligaments and nerves, theses tests will also reveal any underlying weakness and faulty movement strategies your body may have, followed by hands on treatment. Your treatment will take up most of the time in your session and we may use a number of treatment techniques and tools such as:
· Deep tissue, trigger point and pin and stretch remedial massage
· Myofacial cupping
· Dry needling
· Electro dry needling
· Joint mobilisation
· Tissue stretching such as Muscle energy technique and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation
· Neural mobilisation
Our main aim with the first treatment is to reduce your pain and discomfort, improve your movement range and ability, and arm you with a few key stretches, mobilisations and exercises to get you started on your recovery. We will often suggest a follow up treatment within a week or two to re-assess, continue your treatment plan and see how you have gone with exercises. From there you may be recommended up to 4-6 treatments over a varied timeline depending on your symptoms. We also find that ongoing maintenance treatments are very beneficial for the care our clients, with many clients booking in once per month or 6 weeks.
The benefit of working within our multimodality clinic here at Thrive Health Co. is having a talented team of health care practitioners available for in-house referrals. If we think seeing a Chiropractor could really benefit a quick recovery, we have some of the best Chiropractor’s in Brisbane. Our Accredited Exercise Physiologist Rachel is an invaluable resource for really getting into the nitty gritty of identifying and improving movement patterns, addressing imbalances in weakness and strength and getting you moving better and stronger quickly. And if we think you may need very specific treatment and rehabilitation, we can refer you to our superstar Physiotherapist Mat.
Come and see how our Myotherapists can help get you moving and feeling better. BOOK online or call: 07 3716 0199 today and start your journey to optimum health.
Why just survive when you can Thrive with Thrive Health Co.
