Do you suffer from pain? If you do, you will know that there is nothing quite like a high quality massage from an exceptional, skilled therapist to help ease tension in stiff, sore muscles and make you feel like a million bucks.
But what if there were therapies that could not only ease aches and pains, but could increase the range of motion in your joints, reduce inflammation and reduce restriction in painful areas? Manual therapy is any form of hands-on treatment that is designed to help a part of the body function better. Injury, disease, swelling, or surgery often leaves joints and soft tissue inflamed and painful with limited flexibility and mobility.
Physical therapists are experts in the science of movement as well as the entire musculoskeletal system. They not only see how your body is moving currently, but what is possible with a combination of targeted exercise and hands-on treatments. The types of manual therapy each patient receives is different and depends on their pain levels, the area that is affected, whether they have had surgery, and their ability to move.
The manual therapy portion of your rehabilitation experience may include some of these most common types. While effective, immobilizing the joint often leads to more pain, less movement and a decreased overall function of the area. Joint mobilization techniques allow a physical therapist to restore movement to the restricted joint.
Even if you cannot move the joint a certain way on your own, your physical therapist will use slow motion to help it along. Joint mobilization may be uncomfortable at first, but it is an important step in the manual therapy process. Sometimes your body sends and receives abnormal signals to and from your brain causing malfunctions in your neuromuscular reflexes.
