What is Physiotherapy?
Physiotherapy is more than just "exercises after an injury." It's a clinical discipline rooted in evidence-based assessment and treatment. Here's what it covers and who it's for.
Physiotherapy aims to improve your ability to live a full, healthy and comfortable lifestyle. It achieves this by working with and correcting people's movements which have been affected by injury, disability or illness.
Anyone calling themselves a physiotherapist has to be registered with the Health and Care Professions Council, and has to have an accredited qualification in physiotherapy from a university or appropriate apprenticeship.
Beyond Strength and Limbs
A qualified physiotherapist doesn't only work on the strength of your limbs — they understand how to have a positive effect on all sorts of conditions. They can alleviate chronic back pain and other muscular problems, help you cope with neurological conditions such as MS and Parkinson's, and ease the effects of chronic respiratory conditions such as asthma or cystic fibrosis.
Your mobility can also be an important beneficiary of physiotherapy — whether this is a specialist check-up to ensure that your walking and running gait matches the type of sports shoe you want to wear, or personalised strengthening exercises and vestibular manoeuvres to help you keep your balance as you age.
Where Physiotherapy Happens
Physiotherapy can take place in all sorts of environments, from a sports club to a hospital or even an office. Corporate massage is a growing area of physiotherapy, thanks to the sedentary lives that many people live. Recent studies have shown that simply doing exercise after work doesn't offset the effects of long periods of sitting down, and it is well known that chronic back pain is one of the biggest causes of disability in the UK population.
Action Against Chronic Pain
If you take action against your chronic pain and work on it through physiotherapy, you can potentially avoid having to take the surgical option, or make recovery after surgery a lot faster as you will be stronger to begin with. Common conditions which fall into this category include carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain injuries, as well as the chronic back problems mentioned above.
This effectiveness against pain is why physiotherapy is recommended as a first-line response to pain, rather than dosing up with painkillers. These only treat the symptoms and can be highly addictive, while physiotherapy can find and treat the cause to stop it from happening again. Trained physiotherapists can even suggest to their clients whether they should go and talk to their doctor about tailing off their dosage.
Get in Touch
At Lucy Hall Massage, we offer a wide range of treatments which address everything from problems with your gait to easing ear problems with Hopi candles. If you'd like to discuss what physiotherapy could do for you, please get in touch with us and our highly trained and knowledgeable staff will be delighted to answer any questions you might have.
References
https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2653704/patterns-sedentary-behavior-mortality-u-s-middle-aged-older-adults
https://www.england.nhs.uk/blog/charles-greenough/
https://www.csp.org.uk/frontline/article/drug-dependency-hidden-addiction