What is a functional approach?
A standard clinical assessment of low back pain is done with the patient on the table. It looks at the joint motion and soft tissue length & tension to identify the anatomical structures contributing to the back pain.
This is a very sensible first step BUT it tells us very little about how much of the available joint movement you can actually use or control or how the joints work together across body segments and how these segments behave when loaded by gravity.
What we do differently
At MOH we take a step back and look at how you use your body. We look at how you perform activities that isolate the area of injury and then we look at how you integrate that area into regional and/or whole body movements that you would normally do day to day.
This allows us to specifically assess mobility and stability in various key movement patterns with a range of loads and challenges to give us a real-time view of what might be going wrong.
A standard physical exam will tell us what’s wrong with your back while our functional approach tells us why it’s happened.
Why it matters
Low back pain is typically a multifactorial problem that has both biomechanical and neurological elements and the current scientific research would suggest that the best back pain outcomes result from addressing both. This means that in addition to local massage or manipulation of tight or tender tissues we can look at ways to quieten over-sensitive nerves and improve movement, strength and control in all the areas that contribute to your back pain with an individually tailored rehabilitation plan.
Is it time you tried a different approach?