Since moving home to South Africa, I have had one ongoing question from patients and potential patients “do you do needling?”.
Whilst I understand where the question comes from, the idea of it is completely foreign to how we practise at Caley Chiropractic. Adjunct therapies such as massage, dry needling and stretching have wonderful benefits and I know practitioners from a variety of professions who are absolutely brilliant at them, but there is a very good reason we choose not to in our office.
At Caley Chiropractic our primary focus is to find out where your body has lost the ability to relate and adapt to its internal and external environment. What I mean by this is, how your brain and body cannot communicate as they should, and therefore cannot respond to whatever it is that you need to respond to.
Muscles may function “incorrectly” for a variety of reasons, resulting in either “too much” or “too little” function. They may be tight because they are getting an irritated nerve supply - similar to when you bump your funny bone. Or they may be spasming to try and form a splint to protect your body from injuring an unstable or injured joint. Smart hey? They may be weaker due to less nerve supply, which is easy to understand in the form of paralysis, but this can happen to a much smaller degree. In this case suddenly we ask our muscle to contract quickly (like run for that bus) and suddenly our perfectly fit hamstring muscle pulls “out of nowhere”.
As we are always looking for the cause of dis-ease within the body, we are more concerned with WHY your body may be showing these symptoms rather than trying to only relieve the tension. The body is extremely intelligent and if we remove the interference which is stopping it from working correctly, this gives it the chance to “let go” and adapt to how it seems fit, in a way it feels right to do so. Adjunctive therapies such as needling are designed to treat the symptom of muscle tension. The wonderful thing is, not every Chiropractor works this way, which means we have a host of people to refer you out to when those therapies are what is necessary or desired.
Hugs,
Caley Chiropractic
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