When it comes to seeing an Osteopath you’ll often attend an appointment due to an ache, pain or recent injury. However, for longer term, more chronic complaints an MOT style approach can be better suited to managing your symptoms. So what are acute fixes and MOT treatments? And how do I know what is right for me?
Acute fixes
An acute injury often follows a sudden traumatic event, leading to a sprain, strain or break. The cause is usually a well defined event and not gradual in its onset. In acute cases of injury your body will respond quicker to treatment, and the recovery time is therefore shorter. For some injuries and conditions, depending on your injury history, age and lifestyle factors which all contribute to the aggravation of symptoms this approach is usually enough to conquer the injury at that time.
However, a reoccurring injury to a historic complaint that presents in an acute fashion is not the same as a new acute injury. The management for such is much more successful working towards prevention, following an MOT style approach, than it is to firefight the acute symptoms of injury so the surface level damage recovers but the true underlying cause is left uninfluenced.
MOT treatments
This treatment plan approach is aimed to time treatment at the correct interval to intercept the flare up of your symptoms, and prevent episodes of pain from reoccurring.
This style of appointment isn’t block booked, your Osteopath will advise the appropriate time-frame based on your symptoms and response to treatment previously which will gradually be spaced further apart, for example if symptoms flare up every 3 months your treatment will be timed around 8-10 weeks, and the exercise and advise will continually be adapted to you and the stage of your maintenance plan to allow these gaps to be extended to the widest gap possible before drop off between sessions that your body and its mechanics can tolerate.
What next?...
There are potentially hundreds of things that you’ve done in the lead up to your pain, so identifying the important factors in your pain picture are crucial to your treatment plan. To find out the best course of action for your aches and pains get in touch or book online to see an Osteopath who will be able to help start the process in getting to the root cause of your symptoms.