Why choose City Physiotherapy to treat your back and spine?
Your spinal joints can become stiff over time. We lead much of our lives in limited positions, such as sitting at a desk. These positions can lead to facet joint pain, low back pain, poor posture, and a stiff back. These positions cause joints to shift into places of a restricted range of motion.
If we do not regularly move our spinal joints through their full range of motion, they’ll get stiffer and stiffer. Multiply this over months and years and it is no wonder that your spinal joints can become rigid.
Our highly skilled physiotherapists use a combination of hands-on treatment techniques to improve your spinal range of movement. This can range from gentle spinal mobilisations to manipulations of your spinal segments. Often, releasing tight muscles and fascia around your stiff spinal joints helps to improve their range of motion. This improvement in range of motion reduces pain and improves performance.
Why does it matter if I have stiff joints?
If you are suffering from stiff joints, or if your back is feeling stiff and painful, we recommend you get treatment now. Did you know that your spinal joints need to go through their full range of motion regularly in order to maintain their natural movement?
A joint’s lubrication is synovial fluid, it is your body’s form of nutrition to keeping healthy joints. Therefore, a stiff joint is not getting enough lubrication over its entire joint surface and is literally being deprived of nutrition. Why is this so important to your health and wellbeing? A lack of joint nutrition and lubrication can lead to degenerative and arthritic changes.
Stiffness in your spine and other joints can predispose you to the onset of osteoarthritis. Spinal joint mobilisations lubricate your joints with synovial fluid, providing nutrition allowing for your joints to remain healthy.
What is Joint & Spinal Manipulation & Mobilisation?
Mobilisation is when your physiotherapist uses a controlled amount of force to move the segments of your spinal joint. When joints become dysfunctional as a result of trauma, overuse or disuse, they are unable to perform the movements for which they were designed. Joint mobilisation is technique physiotherapists use to restore the small, involuntary movements that assist joints to perform to their optimum. Joint mobilisation involves performing a back and forth oscillation of the joint in order to restore motion.
A mobilisation becomes a manipulation when your physiotherapist performs a high-velocity thrust through your joint and a ‘popping’ sound may be heard. Joint manipulation is characteristically associated with the production of ‘pop’ or ‘click’ sounds. This sound is believed to be the result of a phenomenon known as cavitation.
When a joint manipulation is performed, space is increased within the joint cavity, which in turn creates a reduction in pressure. In this low-pressure environment, some of the gases that are dissolved in the synovial fluid, create a bubble or cavity. It rapidly collapses upon itself, resulting in a ‘clicking’ sound.
The clinical effects of joint manipulation have been shown to include:
- relief of musculoskeletal pain
- unlocks joints, e.g. stiff neck/acute back sprains
- improves joint range of motion
Individualised Spinal Manipulation & Mobilisation Treatment
Each treatment is determined by your physiotherapist’s assessment of your particular issue and will be tailored to give you maximum long-term benefit. This personalised treatment works to ensure that your overall general health is considered and that your spine, circulatory and nervous systems are always protected. Most often, mobilisation of your joints will produce significant pain relief and an increased range of movement in your spinal segments.
Physiotherapy for spinal manipulations and mobilisations also help to relax any muscle spasm present. Gentle mobilisations are most often used for pain relief while more forceful, deeper mobilisations are good at minimising spinal joint stiffness. Joint manipulations are mainly used to restore normal movement in a very stiff joint resulting in reduced spinal and referred pain.
You are in safe hands when it comes to having your spine treated at City Physiotherapy. Book an appointment today to get your spine moving and healthy again.
