Is Daniel's Nerve Rescue a good fit for you?

The type of therapy I offer is a combination of traditional restorative practices (massage/bodywork/needling) with precise therapeutic exercises to promote balance and resiliency as you pursue your activities, hobbies, and goals.

On the surface this might seems similar to what you might find in other outpatient clinics, but I bring a level of skillfulness, and attention to detail you won't find anywhere else.

I create an environment where relaxation, pain relief, and increased function all come together. When you experience this, you will know precisely what I am talking about. Developing proper form and body mechanics is only possible when we can let go of old patterns that often contributed to the problem in the first place.

Let's go into the two main components of my therapeutic approach.

Manual Therapy

There is a lot of debate in the physical therapy profession regarding the use of manual therapy. For those less familiar, manual therapy is a catch all term to describe the ways we might work on someone's body to help relieve pain and dysfunction. It is techniques performed by the therapist with their hands to facilitate changes in musculoskeletal or neuromuscular functioning. It's not massage therapy and it's not chiropractic adjustments, but it has elements similar to both.

Some therapists use it all the time and others sparingly if ever. A lot of this has to do with overall therapy goals and a therapist's assessment of how much a person will benefit from manual work versus exercise. As a therapist, I am considering where you are in the stages of healing and what forms of treatment are most beneficial at this specific timepoint.

The research on manual therapy suggests a range of benefits related to pain, ROM, and overall well-being. While the actual treatment technique does to some degree, a lot of what makes manual therapy successful is how the client experiences that form of treatment. Does it feel relaxing and settling? Or does it feel activating and anxiety producing?

From my perspective, the benefits of manual therapy are directly tied to how our nervous system interacts with it. The bodywork serves as a stimulus allowing the nervous system to unwind - which in turn causes muscles to relax and changes sensations around pain and discomfort, such that afterwards you can have significantly greater range of motion, flexibility, and muscle activation after the treatment.

As a physical therapy, I think manual therapy can be one of the most useful ways to improve body awareness, physical ease and comfort, and set a person up for optimal participation in physical activities because they are starting from a position of relative health and ease rather than strain/irritation. Thus, I use it a lot because I think we all can benefit from being able to relax and release tension better.

Bridging Manual Therapy with Therapeutic Exercise

As your body starts to feel better and you have a sense of ease again, it's really important to work your muscles and joints to make previously painful movement 'normal' again. I know so many people who have had a back injury and no longer do deadlifts because they are concerned about reinjury. At first this may seem sensible, but in the long run you are limiting yourself from a highly functional movement pattern. In many cases, the problem is not the deadlift itself, but sensitization of the nervous system around that movement.

That's what my physical therapy practice is designed to address.

For example, we have to retrain your body to be able to stretch your hamstrings without eliciting a pain response following a hamstring strain. This is where bodywork and therapeutic exercises can be extremely helpful. I will use a variety of techniques to help normalize movement patterns that can be irritating and it's amazing how well your body can adapt with the right input.

As you get better, our goal is to make anything uncomfortable - comfortable again. When you do this, you regain a sense of confidence in what you can do and this allows you to move with less hesitation and tension/guarding.

Through therpay, we are expanding the parameters under which your body can exercise/move safely and this kind of change is long-term. It's not always easy to know what to do to achieve this on your own, and I can help make this process straightforward and achievable.

Why does this matter?

If you are someone who gets a lot of relief with therapeutic massage, yoga, or meditation, you will feel really great with this kind of therapy. It's designed to make you feel regulated not only in your body but also improves more subtle aspects of being by balancing your autonomic system and releasing excess 'mental energy' that can prevent you from being able to truly rest.

Your body has amazing potential for healing, and my goal is for you to experience that firsthand.

Once you experience a sense of relief and ease in your body again, you will naturally want to explore what ways you can be active. That's where I can instruct you in specific exercises that are the building blocks to achieving your goals. I try to keep this as straightforward and easy to implement as possible. My goal is for you to have 2-3 exercises you complete throughout the week to promote the long-term desired changes in your body.