What do I do?

The short answer

I help people get out of pain.

The long answer

When I first qualified in manual therapy and massage, I used to answer this question with “I help people relax” or “I massage people”. The majority of people that I would treat, usually just wanted to relax. As a by-product of our sessions together, they would tell me that areas of their body had discomfort or pain. I would endeavor to reduce these tight or painful areas with hands-on massage techniques: massaging away their pain.

While receiving a relaxing massage is relaxing (unsurprisingly for most). This is a great way to allow your body space, time and permission to unwind. Yet I often found my clients reporting that those little (or sometimes big) niggles, knots and pain just kept on coming back.

My professional interest in helping those people to more fully overcome their physical discomfort and experience longer-term health improvements, led me to re-engage my studies into the human body. These studies are now an essential part of my work.

I have now shifted my focus from just giving relaxing massages, to providing more specific treatments to address chronic (long lasting) pain: like deep tissue and sports massage, myofascial release, trigger point therapy, muscle and joint stretching routines, and the use of hot and cold.

I use very specific outcomes-based clinical treatments to establish the likely causes of pain and dysfunction, and treat those accordingly, over regular weekly sessions.

How do I achieve this?

The path to getting out of pain and correcting dysfunction, starts by talking about its many levels and how it affects you. All my sessions involve a large amount of feedback and discussion (before, during and after); unless talking is not appropriate.

The first session will begin with a full medical history discourse, covering childhood to present, and everything in between. Early unresolved physical and emotional trauma often remains dormant and may re-manifest until resolution is allowed to happen.

Clients are asked to highlight where they experience pain, by pointing to their own body and drawing on laminated charts (these images are captured to allow for future baseline assessments). Rigorous functional body testing is achieved through passive, active and manual resistive movement tests of muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints, as well as classical movement patterns. Balance and perturbation are also assessed, which often informs areas to start assessing further.

Once dysfunction is found, relationships can be discovered through further relational testing. Corrections can be made to dysfunctional patterns and then retested.

You can view a list of common issues that can be assessed and treated.

Read more on how this approach can help you.

Find out what you can expect during a typical session.

Book your session online and begin your road to recovery.