INJURY CLINIC

• Do you have any of these issues: back problems, knee problems, feet problems, and/or neck/shoulder problems?
• Do all your injuries seem to be on the same side of your body?
• Does the same injury keep coming back again and again no matter how long you rest, ice, or manually treat.
• No sooner have you recovered from one injury, another pops up in a different area of your body.
• You’re chasing pain in all sorts of places.
• Surgery didn’t work or you want to avoid surgery if possible.
• Do any of the above sound familiar?

Stepping back from ‘where the pain is’, let’s look at your body as the complete, communicative unit it is, with its bony framework linked together with more than 200 bones and numerous joints, which should allow painless functional movement.

Now before “technical and mysterious” spring to mind, lets consider a simple analogy. Swap the word ‘joints’ for ‘doors’. As doors open, some close. This is what allows movement. If all those doors were wide open, you’d look more like a pile of collapsed skin and bones. If all those doors were closed you’d do a pretty fair imitation of a tree. You might sway a bit in the wind but you’d still be rooted to the spot.

So let’s visualize movement as a synchronized, elegant dance of some doors opening and some doors closing. There are 28 bones and 33 joints in each foot. There are 206 bones in the whole body. Depending on what you read there are somewhere between 300-360 joints. So the feet represent almost 25% of the bones and about a fifth of the joints in your entire body.

How your body moves isn’t random. Your brain cleverly orchestrates coordinated movements using whatever doors are available and depending on what you want to do. Commonly, chronic pain, repetitive injuries and joint surgeries show up in areas where all the ‘work’ is being done ie around those doors that are endlessly open because other doors are shut tight, unable to open. Solutions come in the form of opening the shut doors rather than putting oil on the ones already wide open.

Static measurements of joint position and mobility are not new. Many therapies adopt this practise in a variety of ways – manual testing, X-Raysand MRI scans. You have probably experienced one or all of them. But what the body does when it is lying down or standing still does not necessarily correlate to what it does when moving.

Acknowledging the limitations of the above methods I invested in the most advanced dynamic body/gait analysis in Europe and the only one of its kind in the UK. The Diers 4D Motion Lab. Introducing the UK’s first complete DIERS 4D motion lab. PFM’s 4D Diers Motion Lab captures everything and provides objective data.

Referring to our simple analogy let’s capture how well each of the doors in your spine moves relative to your pelvis, relative to your feet, and in their different planes of movement, simultaneously. Then armed with all this amazing information the challenge is to find strategies specific to your body that will encourage it to correct and heal itself.

Let’s breathe life into postural and gait analysis and use movement to encourage and develop change from within rather than impose change from the outside.

Watch the video above to see the Diers 4D Motion Lab in action.

You can contact me by email at helen@perpetualforwardmotion.com or by mobile on 07917 333364 alternatively you can find out more by going to www.helen-hall.co.uk