Manual therapy

Hands-on assessment complements visual assessment of movement, restriction and compensatory patterns. Whilst you may not create a particular movement with ease yourself – passive movement can evaluate whether restrictions are:

• Structural – limited by skeletal, ligamentous, scarring, or connective tissue adaptations (meaning that the possibility of movement in this plane, or range may be significantly limited)
• Functional – limitations are created by the way your nervous system innervates muscles, nerves, or holds tissue tension. Here movement is possible when passively created by the therapist, and I can evaluate the responses your body makes to movement patterns and initiation.

And whether pain or restrictions are exacerbated by:

• Compression forces – most likely linked to a structural change that may indicate an underlying pathology such as arthritis, bursitis, labral tear, loss of vertebral height e.t.c.
  Here forcing movement or trying to muscle through is likely to create more damage and reinforce habitual patterns of movement that create other forms of pain and restriction.
• Tension forces – restrictions are more likely created by tissue ‘tightness’, dryness, holding, overuse, underuse, or lack of nervous system innervation to create movement.
  Here we can work passively and actively to ease tissues into more functional patterns and enable you to access movement that is more easeful and pain free.