Chiropractor Healthcare Solutions

What Is the Difference Between Chiropractors, Osteopaths and Physiotherapists?

You are certainly not alone if you have ever wondered what the difference between a chiropractor, osteopath and physiotherapist is. In many ways, the three professions work towards the same goals, albeit with slightly different techniques & philosophies.

All three professions are primary care practitioners meaning you do not need a referral from your GP.

As the global brand you can trust, ACE Sports Clinics offer client’s access to a chiropractor, osteopath or physiotherapist in Malvern.  Having helped clients from all over the world find solutions for pain, sports injuries & improved performance through our unique collaborative approach.

Read on to learn which may be best suited to your needs, and remember, a surefire answer comes with a quick phone call to the team at ACE Sports Clinic.

The differences between Chiropractors, Osteopaths & Physiotherapists

A Chiropractor is a specialist in the spine’s mechanical problems, offering solutions that can include manipulation, mobilisation, massage, and various other therapeutic exercises.

Chiropractors can take and read x-rays to help determine what may be causing your particular issue.  A Chiropractor’s philosophy begins with the nervous system & spine.

Osteopaths use a therapeutic approach that is similar to that of a chiropractor; however, Osteos use a range of gentle hands-on manual techniques including muscle energy techniques.

Osteopaths take a holistic approach to the body to treat spinal and peripheral joints, muscles and ligament sprains.  Osteopaths utilize fine palpation skills to detect tissue texture changes that may indicate altered function.

Physiotherapy is a broad field that covers a range of conditions of the musculoskeletal system. Traditionally, physiotherapists use exercise-based approaches, advice & have a rehabilitation & movement focus as opposed to being as hands-on as a Chiro or Osteo may be.

The difference between a Chiropractor & an Osteopath

Both of these professions focus on solving problems all over the body from spinal alignment and posture to headaches and joint pain.  They are similar, even though their approach can sometimes be very different.

A Chiropractor is often interested in how your body works but considers it all through a nerve, spinal and muscular system lens.  They focus on pain relief and injury recovery, using spine and joint adjustments along with massage and rehabilitative exercises to heal and improve a patient’s quality of life.

One crucial element to note is that chiropractors do not prescribe drugs, choosing instead to focus on drug-free alternative treatments.  Some Chiropractors have additional training in Acupuncture.

An Osteopath will often take a more holistic approach, examining a person’s entire body to find the underlying cause of a particular issue.  The focus is often a way to combat pain or injury, using massage, muscle energy, physical therapy and body manipulation.

Osteopathy considers the deformation of the skeleton and interference with nerves.  Some Osteopaths have additional training in Dry Needling.

Both Chiropractors and Osteopaths treat patients by maximizing the bodies range of motion in an effort to restore better overall function.

Understanding Physiotherapy

Physiotherapy is a healthcare profession that looks to identify and maximise a person’s ability to move and function.  Physiotherapy can help you improve your health and overall quality of life.

A Physio has professional knowledge and skills to determine which social and environmental factors may be limiting the patient’s movement and function. They work to identify what is limiting movement and performance, then implement a way to address it.

Physiotherapy is person-centred and constantly evolving as new knowledge and understanding reveal themselves through evaluation and research.  Physiotherapy is an autonomous profession, meaning referrals can come from a range of sources.

Physiotherapy has a primary goal to maximise an individual’s movement capability, maintain and improve movement and function with treatment and provide rehabilitation and advice.  In many cases, this can enhance the patient’s performance with quality, innovative services that are effective and efficient.  Physiotherapy is also heavily linked to clinical and academic studies, regularly adapting to developments in practice, education or research.  Some Physiotherapists also have additional training in Dry Needling.

How do you know which option is best for you?

As you can see by the explanations above, there is quite a bit of overlap in the conditions and injuries that a Chiro, Physio & Osteo can help.  Depending on your treatment preference all three professions may be suitable for some injuries, with clear options for others, e.g., a slipped disc or spinal facet joint injury may require a Chiropractor or Osteopath while a post ACL reconstructive injury may require a Physiotherapist for rehabilitation.

So how do you know which can help you?

Initially, we recommend a consultation with one of the diagnosing and primary practitioners at ACE Sports Clinic (Physiotherapist, Osteopath or Chiropractor) to evaluate your issue, then determine which channel may be best to suit your needs.

This is one of the primary advantages of offering all three options to our clients.  We work as a collaborative team to ensure you get the best results.  Many of our clients see multiple practitioners at Ace Sports Clinics because over the years we have seen how exponentially better results are when Practitioners work as a team and communicate together in your best interests.

Prevention without injury

In many cases, you may wish to see one of our Osteopaths, Physiotherapists or Chiropractors for a regular session to keep your body running smoothly instead of dealing with a specific issue. Similar to a regular car service.

Therapeutic treatment, soft tissue massage & mobilisation, with exercises can be beneficial even when not injured.  Our experience suggests that people who take a more proactive approach to treatment have fewer issues in the long term.

Relieving some tightness, increasing flexibility and checking to see that all your joints are aligned and operating well is all part of a regular preventative checkup.

If you work at a desk all day or have a very physically demanding job, soft tissue massage and stretching can be used in addition to Chiro, Osteo or Physio, to loosen and relax tight, sore muscles. Massage therapy stimulates blood flow to reduce tissue swelling, helping you to feel great after a hard day.

Our Myotherapists & Remedial Massage therapists help with stress and tension and a range of other benefits.  It is a chance to let the body relax and focus on healing and maintaining a balanced system that complements the work of Chiropractors, Osteopaths & Physiotherapists Malvern.

Book a consultation with ACE Sports Clinic for treatment today

The team here at ACE Sports Clinic are here to help.  We also offer more than just the services mentioned above like Physiotherapy. Malvern patients have access to our team of highly trained health professionals who take a holistic approach to their health.

It is our goal to help your body work better overall, as opposed to simply fixing an injury.

Our range of therapies can help you live an active, healthy and happy life.  Ask about the following options

• Physiotherapy
• Osteopathy
• Chiropractic Care
• Podiatry
• Dry Needling
• Exercise Physiology & Strength & Conditioning
• Myotherapy & Remedial Massage Therapy
• Clinical Pilates

If you live in or near Malvern, book a consultation with our friendly, experienced staff today. There is no need to suffer through constant pain or use medication as part of your daily routine. Join the large list of patients we have helped to find relief. We care about helping you feel your best, so let’s get started!… Read the rest

A Chiropractor’s Tips for Living a Healthy Life

When you get care from a chiropractor, you expect to hear advice such as strengthen your back muscles or buy a pillow for your neck. You don’t really expect them to give you tips on living a healthy lifestyle overall. And yet, this is the advice that many people hear from their spinal doctor. The chiropractor wants you to be healthy as a whole, but what does live a healthy lifestyle even mean? How do we begin the journey toward a more balanced, healthier condition? Take a look at these tips for improving your overall life that would be 100 percent chiropractor approved.

Focus on Eating Well

Filling your body with the proper nutrients is absolutely crucial for long-term health. If you’re constantly filling your body with junk, eventually you’ll feel a little like junk. Eating lean meats, fruits, and veggies gives your body a fighting chance at staying well. You’ll get the vitamins and minerals that you need, you’ll be able to control your weight, and your rate of illness will lower like never before. All of these help serve the chiropractor’s main purpose, which is to help you stay as healthy and whole as possible.

Get a Little Exercise Every Day

Exercise is such a great way to enhance your life, and if you do it right, it’s also a lot of fun. Exercise can help you fight off disease, improve your general mobility, and even help to diminish pain … all of which are ultimate goals of getting chiropractic care as well! When you put these two powerhouses together, you’ll find that staying well is as simple as regular trips to the chiropractor and the gym.

Don’t Forget Your Regular Trip to the Chiropractor

Of course chiropractors also want you to come in for regular visits. Why? For starters, chiropractors help to get and keep your spine properly aligned. This helps to eliminate pain, increase flexibility, improve focus, and brings a ton of other benefits to your body and mind. With regular trips, they may be able to keep your spine in proper working condition, which then prevents many of these ailments from returning in the future. Eat well, exercise, and see your chiropractor, and you’ve got a recipe for ultimate wellness no matter your age or time of year.

If you would like to add chiropractic care to your life, visit with chiropractors at The Joint. Chiropractors here are friendly and professional, and they’ll always put your health first. To make it easier than ever to get care, they offer walk-in visits and affordable pricing. Get tips for a healthier spine as well as tips for a healthy life starting with a quick trip to The Joint right away.… Read the rest

What Happens at the Chiropractor?

While visiting a chiropractor is similar to visiting other healthcare providers, it does have some unique elements. You will likely find the office setting and intake procedures quite familiar, but many notice the distinctive appearance of the chiropractic treatment table. These tables are often quite elaborate to allow specific positioning and movement during spinal adjustments and thus assist the chiropractic treatment.

A typical visit to a chiropractor includes an initial intake, physical exam, treatment, and follow-up plan.

What happens during the intake?

An initial chiropractic consultation is very similar to that of a standard medical intake. You will likely complete a health questionnaire and answer questions about your health history. Typically the chiropractor asks you to indicate where you are experiencing discomfort by marking the areas on a drawing of the human body.

What happens during the physical exam?

The chiropractor will start with a routine physical exam, then follow it with an exam that focuses on the spine, with particular attention given to the areas of complaint. The chiropractor will most likely examine your whole spine. For example, if you had a low back complaint, the chiropractor would also likely perform a neck exam because the adaptations resulting from injury or subluxation in one area can result in secondary irritations somewhere else in the spine.

The physical exam typically includes a variety of assessments, such as range of motion tests, palpation, reflex testing, muscle strength comparisons, and neurological and orthopedic tests focused on the main complaint.

What goes into a treatment plan?

Following the assessments, the chiropractor will develop a treatment plan that takes into account:

• The extent of your injury or irritation
• Your general health
• The condition of your spine as affected by age and previous injury
• What your goals are – this is most important item

Your goals of treatment should result from the discussion you have with your chiropractor. Many people seek simple relief of pain or discomfort, while others want to begin a regimen of ongoing care meant to improve their general health.

In initial consultations, your chiropractor will tell you the status of your condition and recommend an approach to care. Ask questions. As in any professional-patient relationship, trust and mutual understanding are vitally important.

What is a typical treatment?

“Adjustments” are usually the central part of chiropractic treatment. The chiropractic adjustment is a therapeutic manipulation that uses controlled force, leverage, direction, amplitude, and velocity directed at specific joints. In other words, an adjustment involves a lot more than simply opening up a joint. Click the videos listed in the column on the left to see examples.

Your chiropractor will most often make these adjustments to the spine, but he or she might adjust other joints, such as the ankle, knee, wrist, elbow, or shoulder in order to restore structural alignment or to improve joint function. Again, proper structure is necessary for proper function, and proper extremity function is an important part of healthy daily living.

When being treated for a complaint such as back or neck pain, you will most likely receive a series of adjustments, separated by either a day or a few days, to incrementally reduce the irritation and improve normal function. This might continue for several weeks, usually diminishing in frequency.

If you can’t tolerate the manual adjustments, you may instead receive mild or non-force techniques.

Adjustments are often accompanied by non-manual therapies such as application of heat or ice, electrical stimulation, orthotic supports for your shoes, rehabilitative exercise, counseling about diet, weight loss, and other lifestyle factors, and nutritional supplements.… Read the rest

Tips on how to improve your chiropractic health

1. IMPROVE YOUR POSTURE

   Our waking hours are largely spent sitting, standing or walking.

2. things such as standing up straight and not slouching. For more tips on how to best align your posture visit your chiropractor.

3. EXERCISE REGULARLY

   Staying active is incredibly important for your spine, posture and overall health. However, our lives are becoming increasingly sedentary, which can contribute to back, shoulder, neck and arm pain.  Integrate exercise into your day by getting up from your desk every half an hour, walking to work, taking up a sport or using your lunchbreak to do some exercise.

4. TAKE BREAKS FROM YOUR PHONES AND SCREENS

   Working at a computer for long periods of time or testing on your mobile device can often create a lot of strain your neck, creating neck pain developing. Text neck is the new catch phrase used to describe  injuries and pain caused from looking down at wireless devices for too long. Symptoms associated with the dreaded text neck are chronic headaches, upper back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain and increased curvature of the spine. In fact some studies have suggested that text neck may lead to early onset arthritis and decreased lung capacity. If you think you have text neck or a headache, neck pain or back pain from staring at your computer screen for too long, don’t wait. Ask your chiropractor for advice or assessment of your posture and ergonomics at your workplace.

5. SUPPORT YOUR BACK WHEN YOU CARRY THINGS

   Picking up and moving heavy items without supporting our backs can lead to serious back injuries. However, bracing our core muscles and bending our knees (rather than our backs), can make moving items much safer. This also relates to smaller items we carry around every day, such as handbags and gym bags. Although bags are fashionable, an unsupportive bag filled with heavy items can lead to spinal strain and pain. Your chiropractor would be able to give you tips on carrying heavy items and advice on posture-supportive bags.

6. SLEEP IN THE BEST POSITION FOR YOUR SPINE

   Posture isn’t only important during the day – we spend approximately one third of our lives sleeping, so the position in which we sleep is important too. Poor spinal health can lead to lower back or neck pain, which can in turn impact our sleep, denying us of the physical and mental rejuvenation sleep brings.

   Chiropractors generally recommend sleeping on your back or side, rather than on your stomach, on a supportive mattress. Additionally, celebrity chiropractor, Tim Robards, recommends sleeping with a pillow between your knees, to ensure you have spinal and pelvic alignment whilst you rest.

7. QUIT SMOKING

   Studies show that smokers experience back pain more frequently than non-smokers¹.  This is because smoking reduces the amount of oxygen the body receives, which it needs in order to maintain healthy ligaments and muscles. This includes important muscles which support the spine, thereby impacting spinal health.

   In addition to this, as smoking reduces lung function and capacity, it makes exercising regularly harder. Unfortunately, less exercise can lead to weaker muscles, weaker body structures and spinal pain.

8. TEACH YOUR KIDS ABOUT SPINAL HEALTH NOW

   The habits we establish as children can stay with us throughout our lives. In the case of our spines, the way we use and treat them when we are young can have a lasting impact on our backs and necks. With this in mind, it’s important to teach your children good posture and how to look after their backs from a young age, so that they can avoid back pain later on in life.

9. LEAD A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

   Taking steps to improve your spinal health may not make a huge difference if they are not integrated into a healthy lifestyle. Nutrition, wellness, mental health, exercise, and spinal health are all interrelated and connected, so it’s important to focus on your overall health in order to improve your spinal health.

10. IMPROVE YOUR CORE STRENGTH

    Developing strong core muscles are important for supporting your back as you walk and sit, as they facilitate good posture and reduce back pain. Your chiropractor can give you exercises to improve the strength of your core, to give you a happy back.

11. LEARN HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR SPINE FROM YOUR CHIROPRACTOR

    Sometimes it’s hard to know where we need to make changes and improvements in our lives. This is something that your chiropractor may be able to help you with. An assessment of your health, including your spine and lifestyle, may assist you as to how you can improve your posture, have a happier spine and live a healthier life.

Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Chiropractic

The number of chiropractic patients rises as more and more people recognize the significance of good spinal health.

If you are a current patient of an Atlanta chiropractor, you already know the positive effects the therapy has on your life, but what do you know about the chiropractic field?

Below are some chiropractic fun facts you wouldn’t expect!

Facts About Chiropractic

• “Chiropractic” comes from two Grecian words. “Cheir”, meaning hand, and “praktos”, meaning done, translates to “Done by Hand”. That’s kind of perfect!
• In 1895, Daniel David Palmer, the father of Chiropractic, gave the first adjustment to Harvey Lillard. These chiropractic adjustments helped Lillard regain his hearing after an accident he had 17 years earlier.
• To become a Doctor of Chiropractic (DC), you need to complete a minimum of 4,200 hours of classroom, lab and clinical internships during a 4-year doctoral program. If you were to combine all those hours, it would be 175 days non-stop!
• An estimate of 35 million American adults and children are treated by Doctors of Chiropractic (DCs) each year.
• There are around 95,000 active doctors of chiropractic worldwide, along with 10,000 students in the United States alone, currently enrolled in chiropractic education programs.
• 32 National Football League teams take advantage of chiropractic. Each of the 32 teams have a chiropractor on staff to increase performance, maintain the players’ well being and treat musculoskeletal strain and injury
• Surprisingly, chiropractic care can be very beneficial to infants. Birth can be tough on a newborn! Infant adjustments are perfectly safe and modified for the baby’s needs.
• Across the globe, over one million adjustments occur each day!
• In over 40 countries including the U.S., chiropractic is recognized and regulated by law. There are licensed D.C.s in all 50 states!
• Injured at work? Did you know you are 28 times less likely to undergo spinal surgery if the first medical professional you contact is a D.C. rather than a surgeon?
• One of the most common symptoms treated by chiropractic care, lower back pain, could cost up to 20% percent less if it is first treated by a DC instead of a MD.