Like all good stories this one starts with a love affair. In particular a love affair with the human body. However, as was the famous case of the Capulets & the Montague’s, this love may cross the boundaries of many traditional relationships. For many years now, there’s often been a division between Chiropractors & Physiotherapists. Yet, it’s a divide that has spawned mostly from a whole lot of folk stories and tales that really have no scientific or even clinical significance.
If you ask and Chiropractor or Physiotherapist and possibly any other body worker for that matter, you’ll find that they all have an inherent love for the human form. What are human’s capable of and how can we enhance it’s performance and well being? It’s this inherent love of the human form that makes us here @ Transitions so excited to welcome Physiotherapist, Beth.
Beth qualified as a Physiotherapist in the UK and has been combining work and travel extensively ever since. As we mentioned, she’s passionate about the performance and abilities of the human body and if you can’t find her working either here or in the Central Coast, look for her training hard @ Watt St Athletic or even catching a quick surf.
3 Reasons to Combine Chiropractic & Physiotherapy
1. Unlock the spine, turn on the Muscles
Every single time a Chiropractor adjusts the spine, they unlock areas of the spine and restore balance to the Nervous System. In essence, a balanced Nervous System means one where the body can both receive all the right messages from the brain and the brain can conversely receive the right messages from the body. This body input, body output pathway is the exact reason how the brain acts as a the central control unit for all of the body’s processes and how it helps the body orientate itself and function in its environment.
In the case of the physical body, many of you have probably experienced an improvement in mobility, an easier flow of motion or even reduced muscle tension immediately following a Chiropractic adjustment. You may may also remember that the number one piece of advice we suggest after an adjustment is for you to move.
Well, what if you were to double down and do really specific movement with a trained professional like a Physiotherapist? It would be brilliant! The Physiotherapist is qualified to observe and assess your body for any musculoskeletal deficiencies or imbalances and they could perfectly tailor the right muscle releases and exercises for you to do. Stimulating the right areas which may have been dormant before the adjustment. It might appear like I believe that Chiropractic is a good prequel to anything as I touched on combining Chiropractic & muscle work before when talking about combining Chiropractic & Massage therapy.
However, if you were going to take your car in for a service, would it be a bad idea to take it for a spin afterwards and get used to your new ride?
2. Move Well, Move Often
Thankfully, we humans are adaptable. It’s taken us a really long time to believe that fact however, we are by far and away the most adaptable species on the planet. Or to think of it another way, we are constantly able to learn ways of doing something better. That goes for movement too.
Think of almost any movement that you do. Are you conscious about it? Do you possibly find yourself at risk of overuse injuries with it? Ie do you get pain with walking too long, riding a bike or even too much time in the computer chair? This is something that we see a lot of on the Chiropractic side of things.
For the vast majority of our clients they’ll often present with their own unique postural or movement based areas of dysfunction however, these problem areas will often return. Whether because of the way someone either performs an activity or because of the way they sit, stand or sleep tension builds up, spinal restrictions and misalignments often happen repeatedly in very similar locations.
What if, there was a way to move better? What if, there was a better answer than “that’s the way I’ve always done it?” For those willing, Physiotherapists are awesome at what they do, helping to teach you the optimal way of moving. Maybe, you’re compensating for an old injury or maybe you, might have been like me, skipped the skill acquisition phase of learning and just “she’ll be right.” But there might be a better way and yes, perhaps correcting the way you move might mean a bit more work on prevention, but ideally it’ll mean a lot less work on cure.
3. Reduce Inflammation
Inflammation always bites. There’s no sugar coating it, it can be very sore, painful and disabling. Both on the Chiropractic & Massage side of things, this is something that we’ve seen a lot of in the office. We think it’s nice now too to have Physiotherapy in the office to also tackle this problem.
Inflammation is more than just local to the injury. Inflammation is systemic in the way that it can effect the brain contributing to a cloudiness of thoughts plays a role both in ADHD and Dementia based disorders. Furthermore, inflammation effects the heart and blood vessels and the major processing organs of the body too. Often, inflammation is pumped and removed from the body via the lymphatic system, but by definition this can be quite a slow acting pathway.
One commonality between Chiropractic & Physiotherapy is that in both cases, we believe that helping someone move is the best way to help them reduce inflammation and get back in control of their life and health again. Movement increases the blood flow to the area and in the same time promotes the lymphatic action that will help remove the inflammation from the injured area.
A few years ago, we touched on the benefit of movement when it comes to treating acute injuries when we wrote about PEACE & LOVE: the new, very long acronym to replace RICE. This targeted approach involved movement, progressive loading, use of heat, avoiding anti inflammatories and many other tactics.
Chiropractic & Physiotherapy
What reasons are out there to consider combining Chiropractic & Physiotherapy? Or as a current Chiropractic client is it possibly worthwhile trying Physiotherapy? Or would an exisiting Physiotherapy client possibly benefit from trying Chiropractic? Above are a couple of our answers and reasons. So let’s mend this broken heart. We think Chiro and Physio are a great fit and personally, I’m excited to be working with Beth. We’d love to hear your experience and after all we are all fascinated with these amazing things we call our human bodies! If you’d like to speak to Beth, try to catch her in the office on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays or get in contact with us @ Transitions Chiropractic + Massage.
References
- Staciwa, J. Chiropractic and Massage. 2022 May 19. Transitions Chiropractic + Massage.
- Saccaro, L.F., Schilliger, Z., Perroud, N., Piguett, C. Inflammation, Anxiety, and Stress in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. 2021 September 24. Biomedicines.
- Solan, M. High-inflammatory diets linked with increased dementia risk. 2022 September 1. Harvard Men’s Health Watch.
- National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. What is Heart Inflammation? 2022 March 24. NHLBI.
- Staciwa, J. L.O.V.E. is all you need. 2020 June 11. Transitions Chiropractic + Massage.
- Dubois, B., Esculier, J.F. Soft tissue injuries simply need PEACE & LOVE. 2019 April 26. British Journal of Sports Medicine.