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Clinical Massage

Clinical massage at Manchester-Bedford Myoskeletal means high quality bodywork applied with clinical care. We address a full range of postural, muscle, and other soft tissue concerns. Combining Myoskeletal Alignment Techniques® with remedial massage and bodywork, clinical massage is your choice for pain management of musculoskeletal conditions and dysfunction.

How Does Clinical Massage Help You?

Clinical massage is an effective manual therapy for prevention of and relief from muscle pain and soreness, postural problems, and many medical conditions affecting the soft tissues of the body.

A majority of our patients have already been through the “medical mill” and have not had their musculoskeletal conditions resolved or improved by conventional means. Many people may have had some improvement, but may have plateaued during their treatment or experienced setbacks during their care.

Even if you’ve had other forms of bodywork such as chiropractic, acupuncture, Rolfing, physical therapy, or have even been to other massage therapists and have not seen significant change, consider clinical massage at Manchester-Bedford Myoskeletal. It is possible those may not have been the correct therapies for your particular condition.

Our Testimonies page is evidence to how people have seen improvement with our specialized techniques.

What’s changed?

Are you a patient or former patient of Manchester-Bedford Myoskeletal? Wondering what happened to Myoskeletal and Remedial massage?

Not to worry! We’ve just combined the two categories of bodywork into one. We’ll continue to use specialized techniques in proportion to your individual needs. And our goals remain the same — do all we can to get you out of pain and back to doing the things you love!

What Our Clinical Massage Is

Our clinical massage combines Myoskeletal Alignment Techniques® and orthopedic and western style massage for best results. This bodywork blend lets us assess and gently treat the body for muscle pain and posture problems.

What Our Clinical Massage Is Not

This form of massage is unique to posture and remedial soft tissue correction. While the entire body is assessed and may be worked on to eliminate common compensatory muscular strain patterns, it is not the “full-body” Swedish-type massage you may be used to.

While our type of bodywork is considered a form of structural integration, it is not Rolfing and the therapist is not a Rolfer.

Clinical massage should not be excessively painful. However, a patient may be in pain when they come in for treatment and movement of head, neck, torso, or limbs may cause further discomfort. Any soreness resulting from treatment should last no more than a day or two. If it lasts longer, please contact us.

Participation

Patient participation during their sessions is necessary to the success of the treatment. The protocols and techniques we use require the patient to actively participate as needed to test muscles, assess movement, gauge function, check range of motion, apply resistance, and such other movements as called for by the therapist.

Equally as important, every patient will leave the clinic with some type of “homework”. We here at MBM are only facilitators in a patient’s treatment. The patient is responsible for following suggestions for continuing treatment between sessions. Muscle release techniques, movement pattern retraining and strengthening take place outside the clinic at the patient’s own pace. Patients find that if they are active participants in their own recovery, results happen more quickly and more permanently than work during treatment sessions in clinic alone.

Choose Clinical Massage

In general, any type of muscular or skeletal type movement problems with functional origins may be helped or resolved through our clinical massage. Unfortunately, structurally-originating problems have not had the success that functional concerns have had to date in resolving posture. However, our techniques may improve the structural framework to some minor degree and possibly lessen pain associated with structural complications.

Examples of functional problems seen at Manchester-Bedford Myoskeletal are:

What To Wear

The therapist will let you know what kind of clothing to wear or bring to change into for your assessment and treatments. Male patients should bring a pair of shorts and tee shirt. Female patients wear a sports bra-type top and shorts. Clothing may occasionally require adjustment or removal in order to work on a certain area of the body. In those cases, proper draping will be used to preserve patient’s modesty. Hospital gowns are available.

Patient has the ultimate decision in shifting or removing clothing, and will never be asked to remove clothing beyond their personal comfort level. Patient always has the option to end a treatment session by simply saying so for any reason whatsoever.

Skin lubricant is rarely used in this form of massage. Lubricant is applied sparingly in a very small area and wiped off immediately afterwards.

If patient has long hair, they may find it easier to put it up or in a pony tail when therapist is working with upper torso, head, and neck.

Minors

Minor patients must be accompanied by a parent/guardian in the office and treatment room during the assessment and the first treatment visit. Parent may remain in the office waiting area while the minor patient is being treated during subsequent visits. Parent must remain in the treatment room as long as the therapist is present when a minor’s complaints involve pelvic or chest work.

Communication

Communication between patient and therapist is extremely important throughout clinical massage work. During a relaxation type massage, for instance, aside from the occasional “How’s the pressure?”, very little communication is necessary or desirable on the part of the patient.

With clinical massage, two-way communication is nearly a constant companion. We use it to gauge soreness level, comfort, location of pressure and pain points, conveyance of state of mind of patient, explanation and results of techniques, anything evident occurring within the patient’s body, such as referred pain, relief of pain, range of motion sense, sensory changes such as heat, cold, tingling, or numbness, etc.

Many people who come to us are not substantially in touch with their bodies, however this tends to change during their visits. Patients become very self-aware, particularly when asked to look inside and describe what they feel. Often, patients report realizing pain or pulling sensations where they were previously unaware of any in existence. Patients often find they become aware of their heartbeat, breathing patterns, experience emotional revelations, and other such manner of awareness. This is normal.

We ask patients to report soreness levels throughout their treatment. We ask patients to use a scale from 1 to 10 to describe their discomfort level. Generally speaking, pain is undesirable during massage. But muscles may already have pain appearing without any treatment whatsoever, and the therapist simply coming in contact with the patient will likely increase that sensation. Therefore, we attempt to work at patient’s perceived pain levels of less than 6 on the 1 to 10 scale. The therapist will check this continually during treatment. Our patients often report pain they experience as a “good hurt”. Pain/soreness typically drops as treatment progresses.

Anytime the patient feels uncomfortable with pain/soreness or area being worked, we ask that they report this immediately. Patient may pause or cease the treatment at any point during the session simply by saying so.

Questions

By all means, be sure to let your therapist know if you have any questions before, during, or after your treatment. You can also send us a comment, provide feedback, or ask any question, by clicking this link.

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