Maintenance Treatment
Here’s the typical way a patient experiences their visits to their osteopath:
Person gets injured, books in with an osteopath, gets treated, gets given aftercare advice and exercises to do, has several treatment sessions and their symptoms get better, person then stops seeing the osteopath.
What then? Is there anything else that may be done once the original symptoms are no longer present?
Yes there is. We call it Maintenance Treatment. This is where you have treatment when you have no painful symptoms with the aim of maintaining your body’s condition.
For example, by:
- maintaining spinal mobility
- loosening up tight muscles so that they don’t start to ache
- preventing any awkward postures from becoming fixed
Maintenance sessions will help to prevent any previous problems from coming back as well as helping to prevent you from experiencing other random aches and pains.
How Often Should Maintenance Treatment Be Done?
This does depend on the person, their original complaint and their lifestyle but for most people, with no new aches and pains, 2-4 visits to the osteopath a year should be enough to help to prevent previous problems from happening again and new joint/ muscle problems from developing.*
For myself I see a sports therapist every 4-6 weeks. Due to my work in Phases Studio, my shoulder and arm muscles can get overused and tense, so this regular massage helps to prevent those tensions from progressing to more serious problems such as muscle or tendon strains or tears. I then see my own osteopath 2-3 times per year (unless I do something new) which helps me to keep my lower back moving.
Overall, I think having maintenance treatment sessions is very beneficial as it helps to keep the body mobile and better able to cope with the strains of everyday life. I’ve even had people come for maintenance sessions thinking that their body is moving well only to notice areas of stiffness or minor tenderness while I’m working on them. While these things may not have progressed to anything more severe the maintenance treatment session allowed for the unknown problems to be worked on and help to prevent them from getting worse.
*not including new traumatic conditions.