It is hard to know sometimes what therapy to choose or who to see or to get referred to, the opinion of someone whose judgement you trust is not always there when you need it. Whether you are looking for a GP, a massage therapist, a dentist or a chiropractor it is important to find someone who you are comfortable with, treats you professionally and helps you fix whatever it is that brought you to them.

Asking the right questions helps and the answers you are given should be convincing and understandable, it is neither good to feel patronised by a childish explanation nor made feel stupid or confused by having jargon thrown at you. This goes for advice too, usually there are things that people can do to help themselves during the course of treatment and things that they should avoid doing. If you are given information to read about your health condition it is a good idea to read it, this includes the product information slips in medication packaging.

You may want to use more than one therapy to improve your health, some therapies work well together, osteopathy and massage when used strategically together can produce very satisfying results. On the other hand pharmaceutical medication may not mix atall well with herbal medicine, even though one is synthetic and the other natural they still may produce an adverse reaction if ingested together. Taking a high dose of pharmaceutical blood thinners for example might be too much if you are taking herbal blood thinners at the same time, your pharmacist should be able to advise you particularly if his chemist sells herbal medicine as many do now.

When you get advice about how long your health concern may take to get remedied you cannot expect optimum results if you don’t follow the course of treatment, long term problems usually need more time to fix than acute conditions. This goes just as much for getting the necessary number of massages as it does for finishing a course of antibiotics even though you think you are “good enough” now.

A good practitioner recognises their limitations and will refer you onto a different therapist sometimes to get further improvement, a chiropractor for instance who is treating your lower back pain might want you to see a naturopath or nutritionist to help you reduce your bodyweight because it may be a big part of the problem, remain open about trying new things.

“Alternate” medicine does not need to be at odds with “Mainstream” medicine, they  tend to be good at different things. You might get neck pain that really nags away at you, the x-rays show it is not bad enough for surgery,  anti inflammatories may not help you either so getting some alternate medicine may be what you need. If you break your leg, get cancer, have a heart attack, feel suicidal or get hepatitis a medical practitioner is the person you want to see.

We still have a long way to go but gradually different health practitioners are learning and respecting more of  what each other does.

Most if not all cultures have their own  manual therapies, they vary from soft techniques like myo-fascial release right through to strong deep tissue methods like Rolfing.

To rub a part of your body that is hurting is an instinctual reaction. Most if not all forms of massage aid the circulation of blood through your muscles, muscles should only be rigid if you are using them because your blood transports oxygen and nutrients to your muscle cells which act as fuel for muscle action. Your blood also takes away waste products such as lactic acid  from your muscles after your muscle uses (metabolises) them like a car’s exhaust pipe takes the gases of spent fuel away from it’s engine. Post massage nausea occasionally happens if you have a large toxin build up in your muscles.

In principle it is quite simple and straight forward, when you get a cramp for instance from doing something unusually strenuous you suffer from a build up of metabolites (cellular waste) such as lactic acid. Your venuous (de-oxygenated) blood vessels cannot expel these toxins fast enough from your muscle tissue. Sometimes a mineral shortage in your bloodsteam can upset the normal chemical balance in your blood (homeostasis) which may  cause cramping.

As we get older scar tissue and plaque can also build up in your muscles which can interfere with the circulation of blood through your muscles which can cause discomfort, weakness and stiffness. Lack of appropriate regular exercise, dehydration, poor posture, stress and poor diet can  negatively effect normal muscular activity and sensation. Massage can atleast temporarily give relief to sore muscles from these causes.

A less than ideal introduction to massage might totally put you off going again, maybe they went too hard  or perhaps they went too soft and you found it ineffectual. Sometimes it feels fine at the time but you felt like a car hit you afterwards. I have have massages that fall in all three categories, it has been my experience that the massages that felt good at the time but sore afterwards, a couple of days later freed my movement up very well and was worth having.

Everybody has their own pressure tolerances. Sometimes you might be able to comfortably soak up the pressure in one part of your body but find other places more sensitive. Many (myself included) find their calf muscles much more sensitive to massage. Massage therapists will usually ask you to let them know if it is too hard, (I do with everyone I see) they will be able to work within your tolerances much faster if you do this.

Sometimes it takes a few treatments to get the pressure just right, it is invariably easier to give a good satisfying massage to clients I have worked on numerous times. If it has been a long time since you had a massage or you have never had one before soreness afterwards is more common.

Freeing yourself of muscular pain is great but to restore freedom of movement is even better, it usually takes more visits to the massage therapist to feel like you are moving properly again than it does for the pain to go away. The maintenance of normal movement becomes increasingly important as we age, it gets harder and harder to remain living independently as your body stiffens.

Getting regular therapeutic massage helps keep your body moving and feeling young.

Acupuncture has been around for a long time, ateast 5,000 years,  infact the oldest known comprehensive text  on the subject, the Yellow Emporer Classic, clearly indicates that it was already considered old  all that time ago.

The acupuncture points (tsubos) are small areas of skin that have lower skin surface tension and higher electrical conductivity than the rest of your skin around and in between the points, it is an electro-magnetic phenomenon. It is anyone’s guess how this system of knowledge came into being although it is stated in the Yellow Emporer Classic that long ago people could actually see tsubos with the naked eye.

Acupuncture appears to assist circulation and although it is best known for it’s ability to relieve muscular pain it is also effective in treating gynaecological, digestive, respiratory and stress related problems too. More recently IVF clinics have started recommending acupuncture as an adjunct therapy for women trying to conceive and acupuncture is one of the few things that can be offered with confidence to pregnant women suffering morning sickness because of it’s lack of side effects.

Misunderstandings have occurred over the years between practitioners and academics of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western Medicine (WM) partly because of the terminology used. WM is expressed in Ancient Greek and Latin words where TCM is not. TCM uses more figurative language than WM and some Mandarin words do not neatly translate into English (nor Ancient Greek or Latin for that matter) which can also lead to misunderstandings. Both therapies work and are good for different things.

Another area of misunderstanding about acupuncture is that one does not need to believe in it for it to work, it is not a religion (and not in any way related to Voodoo!), acupuncture works just as well on animals as it does on people. The placebo affect is just as likely to work with other therapies (including WM) as it can with acupuncture.

The philosophy behind acupuncture can take some time to learn, there is more to it than knowing how to insert needles where it feels sore, the difference between short courses on acupuncture (certificate) and the longer  courses (degree) mainly is due to how indepth the philosophy is addressed.

This does not mean that a doctor or physio therapist who perhaps has done a short course on acupuncture is going to use it unsafely, it is more a case that a person (such as myself) who specialises in it is more aware of different ways of using acupuncture to treat a wider variety of physical problems.

The use of sterile disposable needles has long been an industry standard which makes infection very rare if not completely non-existent and people having acupuncture for the first time are usually pleasantly surprised that it is not nearly as uncomfortable as they first thought it might be.

Acupuncturists pay low professional insurance premiums, you are at a very low risk of this therapy going wrong.