What to Expect
Your treatments may include either site specific work according to your injury or dysfunction or the structural integration series. Your best treatment options are discussed at initial assessment.
First, I will begin the assessment process with a fairly extensive interview about your history and current pain. I will observe you standing and walking in order to assess your current structural patterns. I may take photos in order to give you a visual sense of the 'before and after'. This process also guides me in developing a suitable treatment progression for you. Specific objective tests are conducted to provide before and after benchmarks for range of motion, function, and to accurately focus on your personalized treatment program. This evaluation process provides more detailed information about myofascial restrictions in specific areas of your body.
Site Specific Work: This would involve treating a a specific problem, perhaps joint or muscle pain, post surgical conditions or whiplash. Treatments may include soft tissue mobilization, joint mobilization exercise and or movement re-education.
Structural Integration : This is for the client who has multiple areas of dysfunction and pain in the body. The structural integration series involves contacting the tissues and then asking you to move in specific ways while tissues are opened and repositioned. The process of opening these tissues can involve some burning, like a yoga stretch or exercising some long unused muscle. You may feel a localized or general burning sensation, as if the skin were being stretched too far. This only lasts while the tightened tissue areas are releasing. Generally clients report a sense of warmth, length, lightness, tingling and ease of movement in the area worked and surrounding areas. Clients also report greater ease in breathing and improved balance and stability. The work is designed to progress over a 12 session duration. You are welcome to try out a treatment session to see if it is appropriate for you, but the best, most permanent and progressive results are obtained by undertaking the whole program. I would like you to view your series as a project, with a beginning, middle and an end; not an ongoing and endless therapy. Your sessions can be spread out over a 3 month period or even longer depending on your schedule. The initial 4 sessions deal with the most superficial layers, the middle 4 sessions with the deeper structures, and the last sessions integrate the two layers and bring it into everyday movement. Results will continue to accrue after you have finished your final session. Clients may return once or twice a year for a “tune up” session, to ease the effects of daily life or unfortunate events. Others simply graduate to some other maintenance routine such as yoga, Tai Chi, a workout routine – whatever is appropriate for them. Still others return periodically for a shorter series of sessions, advanced work designed to take the process deeper into your body.
