How do you feel when you go to the physiotherapist for treatment? Sometimes you don’t get the result that you want. Not only can this be frustrating, but it also means that your risk of re-injury is higher.
At Northwest Physiotherapy Group, we use a step-by-step approach to fix your pain.
It all starts with a pre-initial phone call before you attend your first session. We will contact you and ask more about your problem and what your needs are. We will also explain our approach and what to expect in the first session.
At your initial session, we go deeper and find out how your life is impacted and set clear measurable goals as well as your good result and why that is important to you. We both then have a clear understanding of what we are trying to achieve.
We will prepare a written treatment plan and recommendations, answer any questions, outline costs, and discuss any barriers to treatment.
All good physiotherapists will clear red flags — that is, conditions that need to be referred on for further assessment or a specialised opinion. However our experience has shown that neural tension that occurs when the free gliding of your nerves is impaired can also block progress.
At NWPG, we assess and clear nerve mobility in the body through specialised testing first. This simple step restores mobility and gliding to the nerves. When we ensure optimal nerve gliding, we know that progress will be quicker and improvements would be held longer.
A physiotherapist will usually assess the area of pain and surrounding tissues. You may have thought to yourself that they are missing something. When we practiced in this way, we realised that we were missing something, too, and we couldn’t help as many people as we would like.
This is why we became Ridgway Method Practitioners. We find dysfunctions that contribute to pain that are remote from where you feel your pain. The brain is hardwired to protect you and pain is an effective way of forcing you to restrict activities that could contribute to further injury. We know that completing a full body assessment that assesses dysfunctional tissues throughout the body means that we do not miss a key contributor, even one that is remote from your pain.
Standard physiotherapy tends to use patterns of presentation and recognising common conditions. If you follow that approach without being open-minded and curious, you may miss key contributors to your condition.
We thoroughly assess and treat all the possible contributors. We use key movement tests that are related to your pain and use them to measure improvement and to help identify the root cause of your pain. We always assess these key movements at the beginning and at the end each treatment session and plot your objective improvement on a progress graph. This helps assess how quickly you are responding to treatment and gives us great feedback. If the progress graph shows inconsistent or slow progress, then we may have to refer on for further investigation.
When the key movement tests are improving, it means that the brain is reacting to the reduction of load in the tissues of the body as they improve, which leads to less ‘’protective pain’’ and better function.
When managing complex chronic or even acute conditions in standard physiotherapy, treatment often continues even when improvement has plateaued. Or you are told that you can’t be helped.
Our approach narrows down the interventions that have improved your key movement tests to find the primary contributors for your condition: muscles, joints, or nerves that are strained through poor postures, motor control issues, repeated movements, or decreased strength. When we treat the primary drivers, we often find other dysfunctional tissues also improve. The body is interconnected.
Standard physiotherapy treatment can relieve symptoms, but that may be only temporary. The pain is back again before long. To ensure that the improvement holds, exercise is another key part of our process. Once your pain is gone, we also work to improve your tolerance to loading with exercises for strength and motor control. It’s not enough to be in less pain: you must have the capacity to get back to the important tasks that you love such as exercise, sport, and hobbies. This commitment to exercise empowers you to take control of your health and prevent further injury.
Once we have achieved your good result we offer a Prevention and Optimisation Program (POP) with regular tune- ups to ensure that you maintain nerve mobility, manage your primary dysfunctions, and progress your exercise program as needed to keep you moving freely and have confidence in your body.
So, do you want to stop trying to fix your pain with band-aid treatments that only give short term relief? Or do you want to experience a different approach that will get to the underlying cause of your problem and keep you pain-free for the long-term? If that’s you or someone you know, we are here to help!
Contact us at Northwest Physiotherapy Group to discuss your concerns or take our Quiz to see if we are a good fit for you.
