Ready for Change?
Time to Pivot!
Welcome to Pivot Point Osteopathy, located in Antigonish, NS. We will help you find the root cause of your pain and mobility issues so you can feel better and reach your health and wellness goals. It's time to PIVOT from pain and into wellness.
Manual osteopathy finds the connections between your symptomatic and pain presentation through a detailed personal history of accidents, injuries, and surgeries to determine the root cause of your pain and mobility issues. As manual osteopaths, we treat all things body related. To support your treatments, we develop a treatment plan, and recommend exercises and small changes to your routine to support the success of your treatments.
What does Pivot Point Osteopathy mean to us?
When we are ready to pivot, change happens!
A pivot point refers to a point in time when you are ready to make a shift in direction from what you are currently doing; adding osteopathy = the point in time you are ready to make a shift in the way to experience your body. This could mean more freedom of movement for you, better balance, and pain reduction. Your Manual Osteopath will help you stay accountable to your goals by providing you with stability exercises, stretches, and additional referrals when appropriate to support your treatments.
We want the whole story, to understand your symptoms !
Concussions
Chronic pain
Headaches
What structures does a Manual Osteopath treat?
- Scars act as anchors, pseudo pivot points. Imagine having something sticky on the table and putting a table cloth over it, now try to slide the cloth over a bit. Stuck, right ?Fascia is meant to blend into the bone and anchor there but scars create another point for tension to build. Breast cancer survivors who have had a mastectomy can experience limited arm movement, numbness, and tingling due to adhesions around the scar with tension pulling on the structures of the arm joint.
- Joints - increasing mobility taking pressure off the nerves and intervertebral discs. Perhaps my favorite analogy: Two guys are in a row boat. One is doing all the rowing, while the other sits back and enjoys the view. Who hurts ? The guy doing all the work! Joints that are hyper/overly mobile express the pain symptoms. We need to get the other joint moving properly to balance the load.
- Muscles and Fascia- trigger points and tension patterns within the muscles, bones and ligaments suspending the organs. Heartburn / GERD is a great example of a fascial strain pattern in the upper body, through the sternum, and anchoring in the lower jaw bone through the front of the neck. The upward tug of fascia can be felt from the stomach pulling the valve open which keeps the acid inside the stomach, allowing the acid to flow upwards. The fascia where the head and shoulders meet pulls the vertebrae forward from the strain.
- Drainage- address tension around the veins, arteries and lymphatic drainage sites. Swelling around the knees can be addressed by opening up the drainage sites behind the knee, where the hip and pelvis meet and the main drainage ducts in the abdomen. The fascia will be very tight in these areas.
- Weight bearing structures- ensuring the body is weight bearing through the right structures of the body, like a house, we have load-bearing and non-load bearing walls. For example: knee pain mabe be due to the head and neck being too far forward. The tension in the upper body is forcing weight into knees. Treating the upper body tension will shift the weight bearing back to the appropriate structures.
- Cranium - working on the tension lines and pressure points of the head, affected by concussions, sinus infections, tubes in the ears, balance issues, clenching/grinding and extensive dental work. The cranial bones fit together like a beautiful 3D puzzle. When something disrupts a piece of the puzzle, like a blow to the head, dental trauma, or chronic infections, all the other structures react, creating unwanted symptoms and pain.
