What is Osteopathy?

Osteopathy is a form of manual therapy with a person centred approach that strives to provide the optimum conditions for health, by working with your body’s own healing mechanisms to achieve results.

Osteopaths see a variety of people, young or old, from office workers to manual workers, busy mums to stressed-out professionals, exercise-addicts to tele-addicts.

Health risks to treatment are extremely low, and osteopaths are trained to be aware of any risk factors that might contra-indicate treatment.

Treatment consists of articulation of joints and stretching of your muscles along with some careful osteopathic manipulations.  People may fear the clicking and popping of joints which may occur during treatment this is simply a separation of a vacuum within the synovial joint.  If you have any concerns please don’t hesitate to ask.

What is Medical Acupuncture?

Medical Acupuncture or ‘dry needling’, as it is also known, unlike Traditional Chinese Acupuncture does not utilise all of the traditional ideas with the meridians and acu-points. Instead it works on the understanding of anatomy, physiology and pathology.

A common problem treated is myofascial pain with trigger points, tight painful regions in a muscle which surprisingly may cause symptoms in the arms and fingers.  Dry needling is an invasive procedure in which a filiform needle is inserted into the skin and muscle directly at the myofascial trigger point which consists of multiple contraction knots. These are related to the production and maintenance of the pain cycle.

It elicits a local twitch response (LTR), an involuntary spinal cord reflex, in which the muscle fibers in the taut band of muscle contract. The LTR indicates the proper placement of the needle in a trigger point. Dry needling that elicits LTRs improves treatment outcomes and may work by activating natural pain-relieving ‘endogenous opioids’. The activation of the endogenous opioids is for an analgesic effect using the Gate Control Theory of Pain.

Inserting the needle can itself cause pain initially but this tends to dissipate quickly.