Osteopath-Physiotherapist-Chiropractor?

which practitioner best suits your injury?

You have an injury / pain.

You may know how it happened, you may not.  The big question now is, who do you go and see to get back on the road of fitness / health?  “I want to feel as I did, or maybe better, before this pain came along”.

 

This is a question we are asked quite often and as I am sure you have read before there is no easy way to answer this.  So I think the best way of tackling it is to explain how we as Osteopaths work and what we treat, then if that falls into what you feel would help then we will hopefully be hearing from you soon and the pain that brought you to reading this page will soon be part of your past and not your present.

 

What do Osteopaths treat?   Backs?

Yes, we do treat backs but we also treat the rest of the body too (from a musculoskeletal point of view).  Osteopaths undergo a four to five year intense degree course that covers a huge range of subjects ranging from anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, biomechanics, naturopathy and the list goes on.  There is a lot of overlap to other related medical courses.  The reason for this depth of study is to gain a greater understanding of how the body should work.  This enables your Osteopath to spot dysfunction and therefore make changes to rectify the problem.

Osteopaths do not use medicine to do this.  Your Osteopaths aims could be  to relax, tighten, stretch, mobilise, strengthen, identity habitual influences that are maintaining a dysfunction or injury, increase stability to an area, advise you on aspects that maybe in the way of progress.  The above are techniques used at different times for different patients and their injuries depending on what is presented.  Treatment is very bespoke to each individual patient.

Techniques used by different physicians tend to isolate their approach to rehabilitation via self administered exercises, that you would be given at the time and told to  practice them for a set period of time, after which you would return and then be reassessed.  Another popular approach would be one of almost exclusive manipulation of related joints.  Soft tissue techniques and devices such as laser and ultrasound are  popular among all three to various degrees.   Where one may use all three approaches per treatment session, it is common for another to only choose to use one.  This I would say is the best way to describe the differences between the three.

In True Alignment, patients are assessed individually and generally speaking all techniques are used as we feel this is the most effect way to overcome injuries-returning our patients back to full physical fitness.