Identifying the right treatment

What type of practitioner is best suited to help your problem?

For sudden onset soft tissue trauma, arthritic joints and sports injuries

• For serious unresolved chronic spine and joint pain
• For chronic unresolved MSK conditions such as Rheumatoid, Osteoarthritis, Osteoporosis or Disc Degeneration
• For specific sports rehab advice
• For recent onset nerve pain, i.e. carpal tunnel/sciatica
• For a wholistic approach embracing 4 Keys To Health
• For a neurological problems such as Parkinson’s, Motor Neuron, Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke, Head and Spinal Injury

Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy and Sports Therapy

Musculoskeletal (MSK) pain is any pain caused by the bones, joints, tendons, ligaments, muscles or nerves. This may include things such as a sprained knee/ankle, arthritis in a joint, tennis/golfers elbow, pulled muscles and many other conditions. Some physiotherapists specialise in MSK, whereas others might specialise in respiratory medicine, pediatrics, neurology or other areas.

At Nicky Snazell’s we have MSK Physiotherapists and Sports Therapists, the latter only being MSK. In simple terms, the skills of these therapists overlap quite a lot, but whereas Physiotherapist training covers a broad range of medical training, a Sports Therapist focuses instead on injury rehab.

Treatment of Neurological Problems

When you come into our clinic you can be assessed by a Sports Therapist or a Physiotherapist. Depending on the area of the pain, the assessment can look at your posture, range of movement, and strength with special tests assess stability, proprioception [balance] and joint integrity. These findings will help your therapist to develop a working hypothesis, which your therapist will use in consultation with you to direct the most appropriate treatment for your condition.

Treatments offered in-house include soft tissue work, massage, acupuncture and joint mobilisations/manipulations, plus classes for both functional rehab and yoga pilates, supported by a wide range of technology, including robotic spinal manipulation, shockwave, ultrasound, deep oscillation, shortwave, laser and magnetic resonance treatment.

Chronic Pain

While MSK physiotherapy does a fantastic job of treating acute injury and inflammation, it falls short in dealing with long-term (or chronic) pain. This type of pain is often puzzling and can lay hidden within a diagnosis of tennis elbow, back pain, repetitive strain, frozen shoulder, whiplash, and fibromyalgia. The root cause of these types of problems is a condition called neuropathy. You cannot kill this pain by cutting it out with surgery and it cannot be hidden by drugs. The only way to deal with this type of problem is to desensitise it, by relieving the irritation at its source. Invariably this is at a nerve root in the spine.

If nerves are supersensitive, desensitising treatment is required. Perhaps an analogy helps. If an intruder alarm goes off when it shouldn’t, it’s probably over-sensitive and needs adjusting.

Sensitive nerves cause muscle contractures, which deep in the spine cause disc compression and can lead to conditions like sciatica, and shortened tendons such as Achilles tendonitis or tennis elbow. It can also reduce both nutrient and blood flow to joints, aggravating osteoarthritis.

Treatment requires a GP or physiotherapist who is qualified in GunnIMS with a wholistic approach.

 Wellness and Physiotherapy

It’s best to explain this with the help of an analogy. When you buy a brand new car, it comes with a warranty. There’s a reason for this. The manufacturer is basically guaranteeing, that provided you look after your car as specified, you are going to be very unlucky if anything goes wrong under the warranty period. Once past this honeymoon period, you know that you must carry out regular preventative maintenance at set intervals, to continue with many more miles of trouble-free motoring.

Eventually, you will get to that time, no matter what maintenance you do, things will start to wear out and go wrong. Some parts will corrode, weaken and eventually fail. How fast your car gets to the junkyard depends very much on how well you looked after it.

You may have a problem with the headlights, the bulbs keep blowing. No matter how many times you replace them, they keep blowing. Eventually, you get it properly checked and the cause of the problem was a corroded wire in the fuse box. The headlights were just the symptom and you could have kept changing them forever if you didn’t fix the cause.