Active Chiropractic

The new McTimoney Video

davidghallam — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:51:56 +0000

Take a look

A positive Migraine story

davidghallam — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:15:25 +0000

A nice mention of McTimoney:

Migraine following road traffic accident

McTimoney Chiropractic in Peterborough

davidghallam — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:07:14 +0000

What is McTimoney Chiropractic?

McTimoney chiropractic is a gentle style of chiropractic that uses light, fast movements to adjust the bones of the body. It aims to improve the alignment of the skeleton and ensure that the body’s nerve supply works efficiently. Through subtle adjustments, McTimoney treatment may relieve pain and discomfort, increase mobility and provide a route to better health.

Can McTimoney help me?

The gentle nature of McTimoney makes it suitable for people of all ages including young children, pregnant women and the elderly. Studies have shown that chiropractic can be helpful for a range of conditions including low back pain, neck pain and joint pain, migraine and cervicogenic headaches (cf evidence for chiropractic).

How is McTimoney different?

Rather than relying on a few ‘big’ moves, the McTimoney method aims to address the whole body and achieves its effects by an accumulation of many small adjustments. The McTimoney chiropractor aims to check and, if necessary, adjust almost every joint in the skeleton at every visit. There is no twisting of the body into uncomfortable positions and no ‘gapping’ of the joints. People are often surprised to find an effective treatment that is so relaxing and enjoyable.

Is this just a ‘gentle treatment for gentle folk’?

Despite its gentle approach, McTimoney can be effective for all sorts of problems. Builders, labourers and others engaged in heavy manual work have benefitted from treatment at the Peterborough clinic; along with football and rugby players and others engaged in arduous sports.

Appointments

£45 for the first visit (60 minutes – including consultation and treatment), £35 for subsequent visits (20 minutes). Typically, most people need between two and six visits, initially at weekly intervals. Many people will see changes and improvements after one or two visits but others will need more. Regular reviews are conducted to ensure that patients are getting the maximum benefit from their treatment. Once a problem has been resolved, regular check-ups are recommended to help keep the spine and other joints functioning properly.

The Chiropractor

Peterborough man David Hallam is a graduate of the Chiropractic Degree Course at the McTimoney Chiropractic College in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. He is registered with the General Chiropractic Council and undertakes regular professional development training to keep his skills and practice up-to-date. He also holds qualifications in massage and sports massage.

A chiropractic advert

davidghallam — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:51:53 +0000

This made me smile…

;

Muscle or bone?

davidghallam — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:27:09 +0000

courtesy of right index

People sometimes tell me that I will not be able to help them because the pain they are suffering from is a muscle problem. ‘You chiropractors just do bones and joints don’t you?’

It is easy to see why people might think this. I have a model skeleton in my clinic, and another model of the spine. When people come to see me, I am particularly interested to see how their skeleton is aligned. I will move their arms and legs to see how their joints are working. When I make adjustments I feel and push different bones in the patient’s body.

So chiropractic is just about bones and joints?

No it isn’t.

The main aim of chiropractic is to restore the health of the body’s nervous system. Chiropractors work on the bones and joints because this is the most effective way to communicate with the nerves. In restoring nerve health the tissue we affect most profoundly is the tissue with the biggest concentration of nerves: the muscles!

This is particularly evident in people with persistently tight and painful muscles. A massage might give temporary relief but in a very short time – a few days, even a few hours, the muscles tighten up again and the pain returns. This is a situation where chiropractic can be really helpful. A chiropractic treatment can be the ‘final piece in the puzzle’ of a recurring muscle pain. A number of massage therapists refer their customers to me for this very reason.

Back Pain After a Difficult Pregnancy

davidghallam — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:31:48 +0000

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mskogly/ / CC BY 2.0

A was a 42 year-old lady who came to the clinic with back pain and nerve pain (sciatica) radiating down her right leg. She reported having ongoing back problems since the birth of her son 8 years previously. Both the pregnancy and delivery had been difficult – her son had been side-lying and required a forceps delivery. She had suffered from low level back pain ever since – with episodes of acute pain and sciatica if she ‘overdid it’. She had previously been very active but, over time, the ongoing fear of aggravating the pain had forced her to do less and less.

She reported that her back was always very stiff in the mornings and that she needed a hot shower to get moving at the start of the day. She was always careful of her posture. An unguarded movement could trigger another episode of pain at any time.

Despite her efforts to be careful her back was always vulnerable to aggravation. Slipping on ice a year previously had made it worse and helping to move a bed was enough to trigger the episode of pain that brought her to the chiropractic clinic in Peterborough for treatment.

On examination she was found to have a high level of muscle tension and a marked pelvic misalignment consistent with her medical history. This misalignment was sufficient to make it appear as if one of her legs was longer than the other when she was lying on her back.

After her first McTimoney treatment she reported feeling a variety of strange sensations: including twitching in her legs and muscle fatigue in her hips and thighs. After two treatments she was able to report that she no longer had any sciatic pain in her leg and the back pain had reduced to a level where she ‘did not think about it anymore’. Her morning stiffness had gone. Her pelvic alignment was much improved and her apparent leg length disparity was no longer evident. Years of back pain had been resolved by two McTimoney treatments.

At further visits, A’s progress continued and she was able to resume exercise activities that helped her to get stronger and less vulnerable to injury. She was able to take her son swimming and do exercises on a ‘Wii fit’ machine. At a recent visit she was able to report playing with her son on a trampoline – an activity she would not have dreamt of doing only a few months before.

Chiropractic and back pain … a nice advert

davidghallam — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:41:01 +0000

Now open on Saturdays!

davidghallam — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:30:35 +0000

Things to do on a Saturday…

www.flickr.com/photos/crobj/3329219000/

In response to popular demand, Active Chiropractic will now be open on Saturday afternoons. Call 01733 750893 to book an appointment.

Award for Peterborough Chiropractic Clinic

davidghallam — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:48:39 +0000

An enjoyable day out in London last week. I was there to attend the Annual General Meeting of the College of Chiropractors and to attend the College’s Third Annual Awards Dinner held at the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists. I was very pleased to receive a Patient Partnership Quality Mark (PPQM) on behalf of the Active Chiropractic clinic. This is the second time the clinic has received this award.

The PPQM is awarded to those clinics which have demonstrated excellence in meeting patient expectations in a range of areas defined and judged by the College of Chiropractors Lay Partnership Group, including :

Accessibility
Booking systems and out-of-hours cover
Cleanliness and safety
Privacy
Communication
Patient education
Record keeping
Other forms of care offered

The awards for 2010-2012 were presented by Mr Hew Helps, Chair of the Lay Partnership Group.

Look out for the PPQM plaque in the clinic.

Period pains and McTimoney chiropractic

davidghallam — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:05:53 +0000

The following article was first published in the Times Newspaper on 26 August 2006. See the original on the Times website.

It works for me: McTimoney chiropractic

A therapy for backache also did the trick for one woman’s period pains, says Emma Mahony

“There was no question about whether I could go to work. The pain was so great that I had to take to my bed,” says Claire Beever, 31, nursing two-week-old baby Jack on her lap. To hear her speak you would think that she was describing a difficult labour and birth, not the monthly occurrence of her period. But for Beever, a primary school teacher from Bishopstone, in Buckinghamshire, her periods had become the bane of her life. Like many women with this condition in its chronic form (known as primary dysmenorrhoea), she had been to see her GP many times. Primary dysmenorrhoea is defined medically as a pain associated with ovulatory cycles, and doctors usually offer two forms of treatment: anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen, or oral contraceptive pills to prevent menstrual pain and cramps by suppressing ovulation. Beever had tried every type of prescription painkiller to no effect, but was reluctant to take oral contraceptives.

She also suffered from lower back pain, caused, she thought, by spending so much time in the saddle as a competitive horserider. She had started riding at 11 and had had many falls over the years, but it wasn’t until she was talking to a fellow horse-rider about her back two years ago that she heard of the alternative therapy McTimoney chiropractic. “What attracted me to the treatment was that it was described as being a ‘gentle’ way of realigning the back.”

Despite its gentleness, it can leave patients feeling surprisingly tired and sore the next day, and Beever was no exception.

McTimoney chiropractic differs from other types of chiropractic treatment because of its whole-body philosophy, maintaining that problems in one area may be caused by something elsewhere in the nervous system. The belief is that aligning the vertebrae correctly through manipulation will help the central nervous system to function properly and the body to restore itself to good health. As Anne Yorke, a spokeswoman for the McTimoney Chiropractic Association, says: “It is a bit like tuning a radio. In between the stations you still get noise but it is full of interference. Verterbral misalignment can compress, impinge or stretch nerve endings, resulting in tingling, numbness, restricted mobility or pain elsewhere in the body.”

Julia Sayers, a McTimoney chiropractor from Kings Langley, in Hertfordshire, saw Beever for the first time in 2004 and asked about her menstrual history. Sayers had recently done a review of chiropractic treatment for period pain, looking at evidence from studies that had been carried out nationwide and in particular cases that may have been caused by mechanical misalignment in the lumbar and sacral spine.

Lying face down on the practitioner’s bed, with her back exposed through a gown, Beever remembers feeling light brushing taps on her back accompanied by a clapping sound. Sayers was realigning Beever’s pelvis, which she claims she could feel was out of alignment, and working on her spinal mobility to ease the back pain. After what felt like a pleasurable hour, Beever signed up for three more weekly sessions.

“After my first treatment, I thought that hasn’t done any good,” Beever recalls. “But the next day I felt stiff, heavy and tired, as though I was coming down with flu.” She took Sayers’s advice to rest for 24 hours, and to drink plenty of fluids. Then, a week later, Beever felt as if a miracle had occurred. Her period fell between the second and third McTimoney session and for the first time in 15 years she felt no pain. “It was so dramatic to move from that much pain to nothing at all,” says Beever.

Since then she has had no problems with period pain, her back pain is better and she continues to go for “maintenance” treatments at least twice a year to keep problems at bay.

Sayers was equally pleased. “When you consider that up to 25 per cent of period pain sufferers find no relief from painkillers or contraceptives, you have to believe that more can be done,” she says.

WHAT IS IT?

McTimoney is a gentle, whole-body method of chiropractic, where gentle, fast, precise adjustments are performed to help realign the individual bones of the skeleton. The realignment prevents blockages, or “interference”, in the nervous system and helps the body to rebalance itself. Named after its originator John McTimoney, it is the second largest professional chiropractic association in the UK and Europe, growing by about 150,000 new patients a year. It requires a five-year course to practise.

Suitable for: For anyone from newborn babies to pregnant women and older people. As well as pain from misalignment in the spine and neck, it also claims to help headaches, back, neck and joint pain, irritable bowel syndrome, menstrual pain, dental pain and poor mobility or circulation.

Cost: £40-£55 for the first consultation and treatment; subsequent treatments [£35].

Contact: McTimoney Chiropractic Association; 01491 829211, www. mctimoney-chiropractic.org. For McTimoney chiropractor [David Hallam 01733 750893, www.activechiropractic.co.uk]

WHAT’S THE EVIDENCE? DR TOBY MURCOTT

Does McTimoney chiropractic alleviate period pain? There are many reports from women that chiropractic treatment can ease painful periods; Claire Beever’s experience is a good example of this. So far, though, clinical trials have failed to show that chiropractic is better than a sham, or placebo, treatment, though it may be better than no treatment at all. The internationally respected Cochrane Centre examined the research this year and concluded that there is no evidence that chiropractic manipulation relieves dysmenorrhoea.

How could chiropractic have an effect? The pain of primary dysmenorrhoea comes from cramping in the uterus owing to a temporary lack of blood flow caused by prostaglandin hormones. The nerves that carry this pain signal to the brain enter the spinal cord in the lower back. Nick Panay, the consultant gynaecologist at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospitals speculates that manipulation in this region might affect how the pain is perceived or may improve the uterine blood supply but emphasises that there is little direct evidence for this so far.

What else might help take away the pain? One significant step that normally stops painful periods is, according to Panay, to have a baby. In addition, primary dysmenorrhoea normally fades with time and rarely affects women beyond their twenties. Panay says that there are a number of ways of dealing with painful periods. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers such as ibuprofen can be effective, and stronger analgesics are available. The other approach is to use a hormone therapy to reduce or stop the periods — such as the Pill.

Is chiropractic harmful? With so little research, it’s impossible to give a clear answer. The Cochrane review concluded that there is no greater risk of adverse effects with chiropractic than with sham manipulation.

Toby Murcott is a former BBC science correspondent