Neck Treatment

A woman receiving a neck and shoulder massage from a healthcare professional in a clinical setting.

Body In Mind Physio provides specialised services for neck pain. Patients experiencing central or one-sided neck pain, which may also cause headaches, jaw pain, arm pain, shoulder pain, or shoulder blade pain, are encouraged to seek our care. 

Your experience within the first session should include:

  1. A comprehensive subjective history, in other words, a good chat about your history with this issue. When it started, what makes it worse, what relieves it, what does the problem stop or limit you from doing, who you have seen in the past and what effect it had, etc.

  2. An assessment of your neck range of motion, strength and function. We will also look at how your shoulder, shoulder blade and thoracic spine (mid-back) moves to see if any stiffness or weakness in these areas are contributing to the problem.

  3. Treatment - a combination of manual therapy (hands on treatment) and exercise prescription to dial into the assessed root causes of the issue. Root causes are often stiff joints at certain levels that refer pain and symptoms to their referral pattern. For example shoulder blade pain can be referred from certain levels in the neck. If we only massage the shoulder blade, the issue is likely to return, however if we treat, move and strengthen the area the problem is truly coming from, results are more lasting. 

  4. Constant rechecking of baselines - when treating, we will constantly go back to some movements or your pain and see if the treatment option just provided has changed anything. If we get change from a treatment option, we are beginning to form a picture of which potential areas are driving the pain and dysfunction.

  5. Home exercises to go home with - we will send you home with 1-2 exercises that relates to moving, treating, strengthening an area that we found success in changing your pain/symptoms. If we can relate that exercise to symptoms changes, it can be a powerful tool to use in between your treatment sessions to have more control over the pain/symptoms.

Following your first treatment session, each subsequent session should be aiming to change your baselines so that you have less frequent, less intense pain, more movement and increased strength. If we have correctly identified the cause of your symptoms, continued treatment in that area should yield further positive results. If baselines are not improving in a timely manner (generally 2-3 sessions) then we will look to move you into a better pathway, whether that be back to your GP, for a scan or a referral onto a specialist through your GP.