You Don’t Have to Live with Pain

Have you ever visited an osteopath? You probably should. If you have back pain, joint stiffness, movement issues, or even an old sports injury that impacts your everyday life, osteopathy treatments could be the difference between continuing as you are and living a pain-free life.

Osteopathy can ease your pain

Discovery

At West 12 Health Centre, not only does treatment involve careful diagnosis to discover the root issue, but you also learn more about your body so you can avoid another injury. Osteopaths will assess your lifestyle, body, musculature, ligaments, and other internal structures to figure out what caused your back pain. From there, you are given the advice to correct or avoid these issues and therefore resolve the issue.

A typical assessment will test your range of motion and non-invasive pain testing. You will be asked to demonstrate the limits of your pain-free movement, as well as discover your tolerance to exercise and stimulation. This is not unlike what many other medical practitioners do during an assessment, so you should feel right at home.

Treatment

Outside of knowing what ails you and avoiding those situations, osteopathy offers a wealth of information on how to overcome your pain. Whether it is learning better posture or something more dynamic like improving muscle balance, you will learn enough about your musculoskeletal system to stop living in pain.

Osteopathy works by providing manual treatment on your body. This means you have a practitioner working on your musculoskeletal system to strengthen your joints, ligaments, muscles, and skeleton.

The goal of these drug-free, non-invasive treatments is to improve your circulatory, nervous, and lymphatic systems.

You may be sent to a chiropractor or physiotherapist to help correct any issues your osteopath discovers. Working together, these practitioners can guide you through the right exercises and stretching to ease your pain. A strong team that works together will get you healthy, faster!

And, contrary to popular belief, rest is not the best medicine when it comes to pain. You will be asked to move, and move well. Choosing exercises to help overcome your pain is something your osteopath can help you with. Further to that, there are ways to continue to be active, even with an injury, that allows you to enjoy your sport of choice.

Self-Care

Exercise won’t be the only method of treatment, of course. Aside from stretching and strengthening your musculoskeletal system, you will need to focus on your diet. Since you are going to be less active than you were before, it is extra important to eat well.

What constitutes eating well? Eating real food and not skimping on meal prep. Choose whole foods, load your plate up with a rainbow of colors, and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Your body needs the moisture to keep at peak performance and flexibility — which will come in handy during your osteopathy sessions!

Taking the time to cook for yourself will also help you feel like you are doing something about your pain. While you wait for your body to react to physical treatments, you can encourage better healing and mental health by improving the quality of the food you ingest.

Following on the concept of healthy eating and staying active is, of course, rest! You still need to get adequate rest to encourage a healing cycle and to truly get the benefits of osteopathic treatments. Whether you like to get a solid 8-10 hours of sleep per night or prefer to break your sleep into smaller segments, you need to ensure you’re logging those hours each day.

Not only will you get better bang for your buck out of your treatments, but you’ll also be better mentally equipped to handle your day.

Wrap-Up

Osteopathy clinics can help you through your pain. Imagine a pain-free existence — wouldn’t that be nice? And without having to do any invasive therapies or drugs! Many treatments like osteopathy are covered under health care plans, as well. It never hurts to check with your provider to see if you qualify. So if you want to overcome your pains, make an appointment with your local osteopath today!