What is manual therapy?
Manual therapy involves using an instrument or our hands on various tissues like muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, and nerves to break up adhesions associated with scar tissue and free up the sites of nerve entrapment.
Often times these tissues fail to function well due to overuse or chronic stress in the following manners:
- acute conditions: pulls, strains, sprains, and trauma
- repetitive stress trauma - micro-tears that progress
- degenerative tissue - due to hypoxia (lack of blood flow)
These conditions can cause muscular compensations, decreased range of motion, and scar tissue formation. You may experience pain with any of these conditions along with numbness, tingling and weakness if a nerve is entrapped.
Which soft tissue therapies do we use?
Soft Tissue Therapy utilizes the following techniques to help provide you with pain relief.
- Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM): This technique uses specially designed instruments to help break up scar tissue within the muscle and reduce chronic inflammation
- Trigger Point Therapy: In this technique, the chiropractor will use pressure along the muscle fibres and with a range of motion to relax trigger points
- Cross Fiber Friction: This is a manual therapy that helps with maintaining mobility and range of motion for different muscles, ligaments, and tendons
- NIMMO compression: This is another form of manual therapy that alleviates pain through repeated cycles of pressure and release
- Post-Isometric Relaxation (PIR): This stretching technique helps with relaxing contracted or overactive muscles