Myotherapy and Chiropractic appear to be very different but perhaps are more similar than therapists admit. 

Joint versus muscle.

Put simply, Myotherapy manipulates muscles to stimulate healing and Chiropractic manipulates joints to stimulate healing. But let’s go into a little more detail.

Chiropractic theory goes something like this . . .

. . . The nervous system drives everything in the body . . .

. . . Therefore if the nervous system is healthy then every organ in the body will be healthy . . .

. . . So better spinal function means better nerve function and ultimately that means better function of every organ of the body.

It makes sense then that Chiropractors have a big focus on spinal function, posture and movement. The technique is to gently, or forcefully, depending on practitioner, manipulate vertebral joints and improve alignment and subsequently function.

Myotherapy is all about alignment and function as well.

Your Myotherapist will adjust posture and movement by manipulating specific muscles and tendons rather than by manipulating joints. In other words, the joint posture and movement is changed by adjusting the forces that act on them (the muscles) rather than by manipulating the joints directly.

A lot of people don’t realise but you can actually adjust posture, joint position and movement by manipulating the muscles and tendons … if you know what you’re doing.

When chatting to patients I will often put it in these words: Unless your body learns to move differently then we will never solve your pain long term. So I am actually more interested in restoring function than just treating pain. This means I may work in areas where the pain isn’t. Because for every one long-term pain, there are three or more restrictions contributing to it.

In practice.

Say, I might see a patient about a chronic right back pain. They will rarely know about the groin muscles that are contributing by unbalancing their pelvic posture. The solution for this scenario is to realign the pelvis and restore a normal gait by resolving both the back restriction and the groin restriction.

So patients who have seen Chiropractors often ask me, ‘Is my pelvis out?’ and frankly there is no point changing the terminology. In the scenario I just described I can quite honestly say, ‘Yes your pelvis is out, and I’m putting it back’. Of course my way of ‘putting it back’ is different to the Chiropractor but in essence I am restoring alignment.

To learn more, check out What is Myotherapy and What does Myotherapy treat?

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– Tim