How Does our body Develop Dysfunctions?

Over time, our bodies accumulate a variety of small injuries. Some arise following simple tasks- think gardening or household chores- while others are more painful and occur during participation in sports or everyday exercise. Following these traumas, we start to adapt to help alleviate the pain. Think about your knees for example. If you go for a run and hurt your right knee while turning a corner, you may start to have pain and slight inflammation in that knee. To ease the pain in that knee, its likely that you’ll start to put more of your weight into your left leg. What this means is that instead of the body sharing weight equally across your left side and your right side, your left side takes more of the load and this leads to extra stress to the muscles and joints around the knee, ankle and hip. So now once your right knee eventually heals and is pain-free, you all of sudden have even more pain in the joints on your left side! Depending on the case and any other existing dysfunctions, you may even have compensation and pain further up the chain in your lower or upper back. This is why it is so important to treat the body as a unit, rather than just focusing in on the painful section of the body. Manual osteopaths are so effective at treating pain because we perform a thorough assessment that includes: your pain or injury history, your occupation, your activity level, a visual assessment, gait analysis, range of motion testing and finally, palpation. This gives the practitioner an idea of the position of each structure of the body, what joints have restricted movement, and helps them to identify what muscles are tight and potentially holding the body in an incorrect position.