Taking a Preventative Approach
At Gloucester Chiropractors, we want to help you live your fullest life, being able to do what you want to do, free from pain.
Offering preventative care is a big part of this approach.
In this blog, we will discuss what preventative care is and why you should consider it.
An Analogy
When you own a car, you might expect it to last for 10 years. To keep it going, and hopefully trouble-free, you take it for a service once a year.
Mostly, this service allows a mechanic to check things to make sure everything is in working order.
If there’s an issue, spotting and dealing with it early stops you having a disaster down the road and saves you major costs.
Your body is expected to last 80 years.
When was the last time you took it for a service?
Good teeth, good eyes, good heart
Most people take a trip to the dentist once or twice a year. Often, this isn’t for any treatment, just a check-up and maybe a clean.
Doing this helps spot any issues before they become major and reinforces the need to care for your teeth proactively.
Similarly, most people go for eye tests before they start bumping into things and once you reach a certain age, your GP will invite you for a cardiovascular check-up.
But who is doing that for the rest of your body? Who is looking after your joints, your spine, your muscles?
Gloucester Chiropractors
This is where chiropractors come in.
A chiropractor is uniquely positioned in the health sector to be able to provide a check-up and service.
Even if you are not in pain, you should still have a check-up every so often.
This allows our chiropractors to spot any build up of strain before it starts causing problems.
Our chiropractors will look at your whole body, from your feet to your neck, to ensure there are no issues brewing.
By periodically assessing your movement and posture, we are able to address dysfunction early.
As the saying goes, a stitch in time saves nine. Early intervention makes for a much simpler fix.
Preventative Treatment
It is quite normal to find some areas of your body that are not working at their best – we are all subject to day-to-day strain.
When we find these niggles, our chiropractors will treat them on the same visit, included in the check-up fee.
Your chiropractor will also make a note of any findings and treatment done, generating a record that can be checked for comparison on subsequent check-ups.
Establishing patterns over time is a good way of understanding if the way you are looking after your body is working properly or not.
As well as treating any necessary areas, your chiropractor will give you advice on how to manage your body and get the best out of it.
Recurrent Issues
We think a preventative approach makes sense no matter who you are.
But if you have known issues, perhaps a recurrently stiff back or you get sciatica every 12 months or so, a preventative approach is demonstrably even more beneficial.
Your pain has an origin, perhaps a disc bulge that affects how you move, that will be evident on physical examination.
Addressing this cause before the pain flares up means you have exactly the same treatment but without the pain.
In most instances, you can avoid having a course of treatment by intervening earlier too.
Age Restrictions
Preventative care should start as early as possible, partly to for the habit and partly because knocks and strain begins on day one.
At Gloucester Chiropractors, Dr Beth Rawlings is trained in paediatrics, being able to offer the highest levels of care to children from birth.
Everybody can benefit from a preventative approach, no matter what your age. Starting when you are young is best, meaning you are likely to be able to go longer between check-ups and may need less treatment at each session, but you can still benefit if you are reading this in your 90s.
Cost
There have been studies looking at the cost-effectiveness of preventative chiropractic care, specifically for back and neck pain.
These studies demonstrate that people attending chiropractic appointments on a preventative basis have fewer painful episodes and spend less on chiropractic care than those who react to symptoms.
We are also looking at a membership option for preventative care, to help spread the cost of appointments.
Education
Without guidance, how are you supposed to look after the only body you have? The internet is full of contradiction, GPs have only a few minutes to discuss problems with you.
Seeing you regularly means our chiropractors can share with you what they know about the human body and how to keep it healthy.
We strongly believe that the better you understand and appreciate your body, the better you can and will look after it. This makes everybody’s life better, including ours. Our chiropractors would much rather work with somebody engaged in taking care of their body.
Responsibility
The only reason why you clean your teeth everyday is because dentists took the responsibility to educate people about maintaining a healthy mouth.
Think about when you were 5 or 6 years old. A dentist would have come into your school and shown you how to brush your teeth, discussed what foods to avoid and advised a periodic check-up.
Just like brushing your teeth, 5 minutes focussed movement and a regular check-up can prevent a huge number of issues, improving the health of millions of people and cutting the burden of MSK problems to society.
For us, the first place to start is in our day-to-day and that is why we are advising everybody to take a preventative approach when it comes to looking after their spines, joints and muscles.
