New Service:
Women's, Men's and Pelvic Health with Libby Oldfield 

Why are we different from other physios?

What to expect from your first appointment?

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Here is a little more about what we do:

We specialise in pain physiotherapy, which will be different to your experience with other physiotherapists. When you have chronic pain, you may have seen a lot of doctors, surgeons, physio, osteo’s or chiro’s…which means a long list of treatment and therapies thrown at you. You may have found your pain has fluctuated and had a mixed response with all these treatments.

 

Often the treatments are focused on hands on therapy, exercises, medications, injections or surgeries. If you find that these are not changing your pain and your confidence with returning to activities in your life, then you may need to look at a pain management approach.

 

We are trained to assess your history in detail, including what has worked and what hasn’t, and explore reasons for fluctuations in your pain. This will involve piecing together your timeline with your pain experience, including looking at other stressors in your life that can influence. Another big part of our pain management is understanding why you have flare ups, the contributing factors and putting together a plan to help reduce the intensity and frequency of pain episodes.

 

Chronic Pain impacts your whole world, and we discuss how this has changed all aspects of wellbeing including:

• Sleep

• Gut health 

• Immune system

• Work

• Social Life

• Mental health.

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We look at how pain and fear can change your movement, and go through tailored exercises to build confidence with activity. This will be different to what you’ve done before as it’s factoring in the influence of pain, loss of confidence with movement and deconditioning over a long period of time.

 

Think of us as a pain coach, and we help identify what areas of your wellbeing do we focus on to help improve your pain in the long term. It’s a systems approach rather than focusing on just one part of your body. The first session is gathering as much information and understanding of your pain, and having a well prepared timeline of your history can be helpful for us to piece things together.

Once we have an understanding of your pain, we will work on practical strategies for you to trial to see if it will help your wellbeing and pain in the long term. Strategies involve pain education, teaching pacing strategies, flare up management, sleep education, mindfulness and movement retraining with focus on addressing fear and anxiety with day to day activities that you may have avoided.

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Often hands on treatment is not our focus with chronic pain, as often people have already experienced lots of different types of treatments and have found no change in their wellbeing or their confidence to live their lift int he long term.

 

We look at pain from a holistic view and try to implement up to date pain management strategies that addresses the drivers of your pain.If you are not sure and would like to ask more questions about this process, we do offer exploration calls to help give you an understanding of this process.