Understanding What Brings You Here
Pain isn’t only about tissues; it’s shaped by how the brain and body interpret and protect. When the nervous system becomes sensitised, even normal movements can feel threatening, creating persistent tension, stiffness, or flare ups.
Treatment at ChiroDynamics is about more than simply easing pain. By blending hands-on therapy, gradual movement, and education, care aims to:
- Restore comfort and mobility,
- Rewire overactive pain and protective responses, and
- Reclaim your quality of life and confidence in movement.
This integrated approach aims to calm sensitivity, reduce protective patterns, and support the bodies natural capacity to heal and adapt.
Move Well. Live Well.
Treatment Techniques
Manual Therapy
Chiropractic treatment is a form of manual therapy. Hands-on treatment can reduce protective muscle tension, improve circulation, and down-regulate an over-stimulated nervous system. Patients often feel immediate relief from pain and tightness, though manual therapy works best when combined with movement and active rehabilitation. The following techniques are offered at ChiroDynamics under this banner:
Chiropractic Adjustments
Chiropractic adjustments are fast, controlled movements applied to painful or restricted joints. The goal is to restore motion, reduce pain, ease muscle guarding, and decrease stress on irritated tissues.
From a neuroscience perspective, adjustments send rich feedback from your joints and muscles to your brain, helping to keep your ‘movement map’ accurate and up to date. When your brain has a clearer sense of where your body is in space (proprioception), it can coordinate movement more efficiently and reduce unnecessary protective tension. This improved body awareness also plays an important role in pain control; when your brain can trust the body’s map, it no longer needs to protect you with pain.
Adjustments also send healthy movement signals to the spinal cord that compete with pain-processing messages; a mechanism known as the Gate Control Theory. By increasing non-painful sensory input, adjustments can ‘close the gate’ to threat signals involved in pain processing, making movement feel safer and less threatening. When the body feels safe, it can relax, move more freely, and heal more efficiently.
Dry Needling / Trigger Point Therapy
Muscles under long-term tension can develop tight, sensitive spots (trigger points) that refer pain to other areas.
Trigger point therapy involves gentle pressure, stretching, or dry needling to release these areas. Dry needling works by stimulating the nervous system to release your body’s natural pain-relieving chemicals while improving blood flow and easing tight, overactive muscles. This helps calm protective tension, reduce pain, and restore easier, more comfortable movement.
Movement
Movement and exercise are about more than pain relief, they help retrain the body and nervous system to move confidently, prevent flare-ups, and build long-term resilience.
This includes graded mobility, strength, and coordination work. By gradually exposing the body to safe movement challenges, protective pain patterns can be re-wired so you can return to your daily life with confidence. Techniques such as the McKenzie Method (Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy) are often incorporated to guide movement in specific directions that reduce pain sensitivity, restore joint mechanics, and empower you with self-management tools.
Device-Assisted Therapies
Treatments that use mechanical or electrical energy to influence tissues and modulate pain. The following modalities are offered at ChiroDynamics under this banner:
Shockwave Therapy
Shockwave therapy uses focused sound waves to stimulate blood flow and tissue repair.
“Will it hurt?” Most describe the sensation as strong and uncomfortable, but tolerable. Settings are always adjusted to your tolerance level to make treatment as comfortable as possible.
Beyond physical healing, research suggests shockwave can also reduce nerve sensitivity, meaning it helps retrain the nervous system not to over-react to normal movement. This makes it especially useful for chronic tendon or muscle pain.
V-Actor Therapy
V-Actor therapy uses gentle vibration pulses to help muscles relax, improve blood flow, and speed up recovery. The rhythmic stimulation sends calming feedback to the nervous system, easing tightness and promoting more comfortable movement.
TENS
TENS uses gentle electrical currents to help calm pain and muscle tension. It works by influencing how nerves send and process threat messages involved in pain processing; either by “closing the gate” at the spinal cord level or by activating your body’s natural pain-relief pathways.
Common Presentations
Whatever your pattern, pain is complex and is rarely just a local problem; it’s a whole system experience.
With that in mind, the following are some of the musculoskeletal presentations that often bring people to chiropractic care.
- Lower back pain – from acute strain to persistent, recurring episodes
- Neck and shoulder pain – including stiffness, muscle tension, and movement restriction
- Nerve-related pain – such as sciatica, tingling, numbness, or arm symptoms related to thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS)
- Headaches and jaw tension (TMJ dysfunction) – often linked to postural or muscle tension patterns
- Mid-back or rib pain – sometimes associated with desk posture or restricted breathing mechanics
- Hip and pelvic discomfort – including referred pain or movement limitation
- Repetitive strain and overuse injuries – such as tendinopathies or work-related muscle fatigue
- Postural fatigue and movement control issues – when the body feels “stuck” or uncoordinated
- Persistent tension or tightness – even after rest, stretching, or massage
- Pain following injury or surgery – to assist recovery and restore functional movement
- Chronic or complex pain conditions – where pain persists beyond expected healing times or occurs without clear tissue damage, such as fibromyalgia or complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)
My approach ensures that each case is assessed through an integrated framework that considers the interaction between your nervous system, movement patterns, and daily activities. The right combination of techniques depends on your body, your story, and your goals.
Lets find out what works best for you. Click here to book an appointment today.