At Innovative Pain and Wellness, we strive to provide the optimal healing environment for each patient in our state-of-the-art facility. Our highly-skilled physical therapists will teach you how to prevent or manage your condition so that you will achieve long-term health benefits.

Our physical therapist will give you a full examination and develop a treatment plan using techniques to promote movement, reduce pain, restore function, and prevent disability. Additionally, our physical therapists can help you prevent the loss of mobility before it occurs by developing fitness and wellness-oriented programs for healthier and more active lifestyles.

In the physical therapy field, manual therapy uses skilled, hands-on techniques, including but not limited to manipulation and mobilization to diagnose and treat:

• soft tissue and joints to reduce pain
• increase range of motion
• decrease myofascial restrictions to improve muscle length
• decrease swelling or inflammation
• assist the body in muscle or soft tissue repair, extensibility and stability
• facilitate movement to improve function

We emphasize manual treatments including spinal manipulation (physical therapy adjustment) and other joint and soft-tissue therapies.

“Our physical therapists can teach you how to prevent or manage your condition so that you will achieve long-term health benefits.”

Manual Therapy Techniques

Soft Tissue Techniques

• Manual lymph drainage
• Soft tissue mobilization
• Functional mobilization
• Scar mobilization
• Myofascial release
• Strain counter-strain
• Craniosacral therapy
• Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM)
• Cupping

Joint Techniques

• Joint mobilization
• Joint manipulation/thrust
• Muscle energy techniques
• Mulligan techniques
• Traction

Touch therapy, such as massage, is a common form of manual therapy. There are many benefits of touch therapy–soothing a hypersensitive nervous system, improving sleep patterns, and boosting the immune system.

When manual therapy is used in a physical therapeutic setting, scars become pain-free, soft tissue restrictions melt away, and joint motion improves. Physical therapy can help reduce edema, control lymphedema, and unload joints to reduce pain even during the most ordinary orthopedic treatment of stretching a joint to improve motion.

Manual therapy can improve several injuries or problems, such as:

• Neck pain (disc pathology, muscle spasm, rib hypomobility, postsurgical neck pain)
• Low back pain (disc pathology, facet joint impingement/ hypomobility, spinal stenosis, post-surgical back pain)
• Thoracic spine/mid-back pain
• Headaches (tension headaches, migraines)
• TMJ dysfunction
• Hip pain (hip impingement, myofascial hip pain in the buttock or lateral hip, hip bursitis, post-surgical hip replacements)
• Knee pain (patellofemoral dysfunction, IT band tendonitis, postsurgical knees including total knee replacements)
• Ankle pain (ankle sprains, chronic ankle pain, ankle arthritis, postsurgical ankle pain)
• Shoulder pain (impingement syndrome, scapular dyskinesia, frozen shoulder/adhesive capsulitis, post-surgical shoulder)
• Fibromyalgia

Not all physical therapists use manual therapy techniques because it takes a lot of time, hands-on learning, and skill to become adept at performing the most complex manual therapy techniques. It takes special ability to feel differences in tissue consistency and assess the problems occurring in soft tissues and joints with your hands alone, without the assistance of imaging (soft tissue and joint restrictions are not typically visible in most imaging).

Manual therapy is a gift and a combined motor and sensory skill that takes time and patience to master; one that not every practitioner can or chooses to pursue.

We suggest you try physical therapy, even if you have not had success with it in the past. We combine the best of hands-on manual therapy techniques with functional strength and stability techniques critical to reduce pain and restore your body to healthy and efficient movement patterns.

Everyone at Innovative Pain and Wellness is skilled and knowledgeable in integrative care, and the treatment you will receive is world-class. Experience the difference that a hands-on approach to healing can make at Innovative Pain and Wellness.