This is a transcription of a video which you can find in the podcast section of our website
Dr. H: Hello everyone, I am Doctor Emily Hurley and this is Holly McClintock. She is one of our wonderful licensed massage therapists we have working here at Hurley Chiropractic and we wanted to talk to you a bit about what to expect if you do book muscle work here at our clinic, so Holly can you tell us a little bit about what is therapeutic muscle work?
Holly: Therapeutic muscle work is actually a little different than massage. It’s more of a manual therapy and we address the structural problems of the body along with the muscles and we also want to focus on the connective tissue in the body and open it up, so that it is making more space for the muscle to relax in its own housing because all muscles have that white connective tissue over them. Once we free that up, then the muscles can kind of just come back to rest where they belong and that also alleviates the pain in the patient.
Dr. H: Wow. Okay, great. How would you say that’s different in an experience here is different than a massage at a spa?
Holly: An experience here is going to be more focused on trying to get the person out of pain, get them more comfortable, it’s going to be very much more specific to an area that they are having concerns with, whereas overall in a spa, you’re going to go in and focusing on relaxation and a lot more longer soothing strokes to relax the person. Here we are going be doing again, more manual therapy, where we are moving the tissue around and manipulating it, in order to alleviate pain. So, not that a spa massage can’t alleviate pain, but here our focus is definitely about getting rid of the pain and the constriction a person has been feeling, either for a short time or a long time.
Dr. H: Great! Thank you and really targeted towards healing I would say.
Holly: Yes! Much more toward healing!
Dr. H: Awesome! How would you say you’ve seen the benefits of combining Chiropractic with muscle work and maybe we’ll tell everyone your background as coming from a massage clinic that you owned and operated in Colorado, correct?
Holly: Right, correct. For 20 years, my husband and I owned and operated a physical rehab, and massage (clinic), we also did exercise therapies in our practice and we worked a lot with surgeons’ and Chiropractors, other Physical therapists would refer to us. Kind of where that balance between the, what you would call the traditional massage world and physical therapy world. Our work was very result oriented, into getting the person into better shape, either pre or post-surgical and also workman’s comp. A lot of workman’s comp. injuries that we would work with.
Dr. H: So, you’ve talked to me before about when you worked at that clinic when you owned your clinic in Colorado, you referred a lot with chiropractors and now you’re here at our clinic with us, so tell us why you sought us out to work with and what benefits you’ve seen in patients that get muscle work and chiropractic together?
Holly: Well, actually, they go hand-in-hand. As you know, the muscles all connect to the spine. And we feel like once you can get the muscles to either relax or let down to get them more functional, the chiropractic adjustments hold a lot longer for the people. A lot of times, people will get adjusted and say, “Oh, well that didn’t last very long,” and if they work in pair with a massage therapist or any type of manual therapist they usually get longer results. We are addressing both of the issues, both the skeleton and the muscles.
Dr. H: We’ve definitely seen that, too. We love to offer this type of muscle work by our massage therapists at Hurley Chiropractic. Thank you for talking about this with us, Holly.
