Eoin Roe has a chiropractic clinic in Skibbereen. He is also a certified functional medicine practitioner and provides help with chronic health conditions.
Call 087 9582362
www.roehealth.ie
Many people believe that chiropractic is only about alignment or putting vertebra back in place, so it may surprise you that I am most interested in your functional movement; meaning that I use chiropractic and other techniques to ensure that you have a full range of motion so that your reflexes and muscles work correctly and you are pain free.
In MSK (musculoskeletal) terms, how well you function, is reliant on how well your muscles are working. Of course, you can have problems with ligaments or changes in joints, such as a condition like arthritis, which would affect your ability to move with stability and without pain but, how well you move muscles is more important. This is a different thing from strength and fitness, as it assesses the functional ability of muscles from a neurological perspective.
Most people present to me with pain as the main complaint and, even if this pain is from arthritis or an injury (new or old), there is always some level of dysfunction in the muscles around the joint. Being able to assess this and then figure out what is causing it can really help with the speed and effectiveness of recovery.
Reflexes are an important physiological function allowing you to move and respond to the world around you – i.e walking on uneven ground, being jolted around when driving on a bumpy road – and the better your reflexes work, the more resilient you will be.
You will all be familiar with a reflex test: When a doctor looks for a response from your muscles by hitting a tendon with a reflex hammer, the one that will be most familiar is below the knee, causing your foot flying forward in response. The nature of this response will give a clue to the doctor as to where an issue may be.
When assessing muscle function through muscle testing, the nature of the response of muscles can give us clues as to where the problem stems from. Oftentimes this may be a localised response to pain, spinal misalignment, joint misalignment or nerve entrapment but also relate to systemic issues such as nutritional deficiency or inflammation from conditions like IBS or metabolic disease.
Understanding the root cause for muscles not working properly can lead to a better, quicker recovery. If there is an underlying nutritional deficiency causing the problem, addressing this will help the body to heal and provide a longer lasting result; it may also make any rehab or physical therapy more effective.
Something often missed that will have a big effect on the progress and speed of recovery is a problem with balance or dizziness. Vestibular issues have effects on postural stability, which have a direct impact on functional ability. Classic problems like BPPV (benign proximal positional vertigo) are often very simple to resolve; more subtle balance or dizziness issues are treatable with specific exercises but take more time. These issues may not be the same as classical vertigo where the room is spinning but may present as feeling wobbly or with visual disturbance and can be caused by an ear infection (even from a long time ago), concussions or other illness.
Paying attention to functional movement, reflexes and balance issues, and resolving them, can lead to better results from rehabilitation after injury, resolve longstanding joint problems that don’t seem to respond to other interventions, or just make you stronger, more resilient, and less prone to injury.
Eoin Roe is a Chiropractor and Functional Medicine Practitioner based in Skibbereen, please feel free to make contact through the website www.roehealth.ie or call 028 62081 and leave a message.
