Is Physio Right For My Back & Neck Pain?


Every day we put a lot of pressure on our backs. And over time, that pressure works away at weaknesses, your little flaws and long-forgotten injuries. You cope, often completely unaware that you are coping, but it has an impact on your spinal column and all the muscles and ligaments that support it.
You end up with back pain, neck pain, or both.

Your first indication that something's wrong often pops up in routine activities, rather than a trauma— when you are crouching to garden, lifting a child or groceries from the back seat, even shoveling snow. Often the pain will often subside within a day, but it can last for days or weeks. It could also become a chronic condition, and your new normal.
A physiotherapist can change that story. A musculoskeletal assessment will look at your strength and weaknesses, identifying unusual restrictions in your range of motion, or if specific muscle groups need to compensate for weaknesses elsewhere. Ideally, a physiotherapist might be able to identify problems before they have time to become real problems. And where those problems do exist, there are a wide range of therapies and interventions that can help your muscles, ligaments and spine to work better together.
So is physio right for neck and back pain? Definitely. But don't wait until after a long wait to see the surgeon. Physio can help before drastic steps become necessary.
 

At Midtown we have extensive experience in preventing, managing and treating back pain. There is some bad news—that pain won't usually disappear as quickly as it arrived. The good news is that your initial assessment will give you important information about what's wrong, and a plan to deal with it.


—We will give you a comprehensive musculoskeletal assessment to determine the source of your back pain.
— Together we will set goals and develop a treatment program that will help you accomplish them.
—Then we start to treat it.
—Finally, we will book the next couple sessions, hopefully with a provisional sense of how much physio you'll be looking at. We will probably also be providing you with some exercises to do at home between sessions. Because in physio, you are an active participant in your own rehab.

That first physiotherapy assessment is 60 minutes, but it can go longer when there's a complex medical history or finding. Follow up sessions will be shorter, depending on the interventions and treatment required. That might include:

— Manual therapy.
— Exercise to mobilize, stretch, or strengthen the muscles of the back.
— Postural retraining and education.
— Dry needling, interferential current, and other modalities for relief of acute pain.

Physio helps. Get back doing what you do.


Call Shalini at (416) 792-7447 to book an appointment. Or you can see our schedules online and book one yourself. Just click on one of our physios on this page and find a time in the schedule that works for you.