Most people usually call an Osteopathic Manual Practitioner to help them when they are in pain, unwell, or suffering from an injury.
Did you know that Osteopathic Manual Therapy is not only a curative treatment but it can also be used as preventative health care to avoid pain in the first place? In fact, prevention and keeping you well is one of Osteopathy’s strongest purposes.
Body Adaptations: Good and Bad
No matter how careful you are and how many precautions you take when you are performing your activities, your body will always have to adapt to minor dysfunctions. Whether you have just missed a step trail running in the endowment lands at UBC or turned a little too abruptly playing in your recreational soccer match, adaptations are needed everywhere.
Your body has a wonderful ability to modify itself in order to always be as efficient as possible. It can move your centre of gravity to compensate for a tired leg by distributing a larger portion of your weight to the other side.
It can also adapt for a twisted pelvis by turning the rest of the spine in the opposite direction in order to maintain your eyes always looking straight and forward.
These are just a couple of examples among so many others of how our body adapts.
Even though these adaptations are meant to keep the body efficient, they are also making it weaker and more vulnerable.
Joints are not working the way they are designed to and muscles trajectories are modified, resulting in an increasing amount of effort and energy required to keep doing their usual actions. In some cases, muscles are unable to relax properly — which means you are maintaining an adaptive posture and making the body more susceptible to injuries.
Each adaptation taken separately may not necessarily be painful, but the accumulation of all these adaptations likely will be. When the body is no longer able to adapt, injuries occur, even when you perform something simple like bending down to pick up your towel at the gym.
How Osteopathy Can Help
Osteopathy allows us to detect even small changes in anatomy in the quality of body tissues and in bio mechanics efficiency. We can then pinpoint adaptive processes and understand how they work, why they are in place, and their root cause.
Knowing that, we can then effectively treat the cause, manage the adaptations and re-adjust the body to allow for optimal and safer functioning and performance.
What if we were able to treat your slightly misaligned ankle that occurred when you slipped on a root hiking The Chief before it created adaptations as part of your preventative health care plan?
This may have occurred without you even noticing but left untreated you will eventually feel unexplained pain in your ankle, your knee and/or even your hip and lower back.
Preventative health care can address the issue before symptoms present and before mechanical compensations occur in other areas of your body.
Preventative Health Care in Vancouver
People seek Osteopathy Manual Therapy mostly as a curative treatment when they are already suffering, when they are already restricted in their movements, and after trauma or injuries occur.
It’s such a pity that not many are using this wonderful therapy in one of its most powerful uses: as Preventative Health Care. That is, helping your body maintain its equilibrium and avoid disease.
One may think that this is only for active people who are road cycling for hours, running the seawall on a regular basis, training to beat their climbing time on the Grouse Grind, or for those skiing down snow packed hills on our local mountains.
Yes, of course these athletes and weekend warriors are benefiting greatly by proactively treating minor somatic dysfunctions and their adaptations; in turn, making them less susceptible to sport related injuries and even increasing their potential and performances.
But everyone can benefit immensely from Osteopathy Manual Therapy. Your body is constantly dealing with compensations in your day-to-day life.
Osteopathy Manual Therapy is not only a curative treatment. One of its main purposes is to prevent injuries and to act before the symptoms occur. It is without a doubt a powerful tool that one can count on. Here at Ananta Wellness and Osteopathy in Vancouver, that’s what we do: we help the body heal and stay healthy.
Interested in finding out more? Read Benefits of Osteopathy or contact us to book a 15-minute free phone consultation. We’d love to hear from you!
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