Are you suffering from deep, chronic back pain that a traditional massage can’t seem to help with? Perhaps you’ve even tried various stretching exercises you saw online or visiting a chiropractor. Your condition improves for a few hours or days, but the pain keeps on coming back. In fact, now you notice that just standing/sitting all day or short extended periods of walking seem to bring the issue back. You‘re in this cycle of discomfort where you keep coming in for treatments, but are never really fully recovering.
If you find that the pain never really goes away, no matter how many treatments you’ve had, you might actually be suffering from acute chronic pain. It’s a completely different type of pain that needs to be dealt with using different techniques, and in fact, traditional treatments might only be making things worse.
You might be wondering how you developed this condition. While in some instances, chronic pain might occur suddenly as a result of a sports-related injury, it most often occurs gradually. This usually arises from a bad habit that has developed and potentially deformed your body over a long period of time.
Slouching, incorrect seating position while sat at your desk, an unusual gait where you prefer one foot over the other when walking, pelvic imbalance from crossing your leg one way more often than the other – all of these types of habits slowly work at twisting your body in unnatural ways that can negatively affect your bones and muscles in the long term.
So what can you do about it? If through repeated treatments (stretching, exercise, and traditional massages), the pain goes away within a couple of weeks, then you probably shouldn’t have anything to worry about. However, if the pain keeps returning after successive treatments, it might be time to visit a specialist.
At Pain Away Clinic, we treat and help patients recover from this type of pain by employing Deep Tissue Massage – a method we’re quite known for and have been practicing for many years. We treat patients with chronic pain on a daily basis, and our licensed physical therapists are knowledgeable in pain relief and recovery. We take detailed muscle analysis and reports to help determine problem areas, fix bad habits that may be causing more harm, and educate our patients on what they can do to help with recovery at home.
Here is an example of our Muscle Reports (click on the image to zoom):
What is deep tissue massage?
Let’s get things straight – please do not confuse a Deep Tissue Massage to a “deep” traditional massage. They are two different types of massage therapy, and have different intended use. You’ll find a Deep Tissue Massage isn’t the same type of massage as what you’d get at a traditional Thai Massage establishment – there’ll often be no essential oils and scent of lemongrass.
Instead, Deep Tissue Massage as a technique, involves a lot of muscle manipulation – applying sustained pressure using slow, deep strokes to target the innermost layers of your muscles and connective tissues. These are sometimes called “trigger points”, and when they are pressed and massaged, it might even be slightly painful compared to other more traditional massage therapies.
How does deep tissue massage work?
Deep Tissue Massage is usually employed when a patient is suffering from chronic pain, often from a result of bad lifelong habits. It differs from other types of massage in two key ways:
- Amount of Pressure – While Deep Tissue Massage also uses mostly the palms, fingers, forearms, and elbows to knead and manipulate the affected muscles in the body, the amount of pressure used is often far greater as the technique involves having to manipulate the inner musculoskeletal problem areas
- Intended Use – Although other forms of traditional massage therapy aim to promote relaxation and reduce tension, Deep Tissue Massage is used to treat chronic pain and correct irregularities in a patient’s body. This is usually accompanied with a full Muscle Report, which allows the patient to visualize these irregularities and how they are affecting the body and causing pain.
At our clinic, you start off a Deep Tissue Massage session by first consulting with our physical therapist (or a doctor in more severe cases). The quick examination is so they are able to determine the current state of your body, and this will often be accompanied by a Muscle Report. Our therapist will also ask you questions about your daily habits at home, work, and in general to see if there’s anything that may be exacerbating your condition.
Following the examination, our therapist will bring you into a treatment room to administer pain relief to the key problem area through deep tissue massage. This might be especially painful if this is the first time you’ve done this, but we promise you’ll be feeling much better at the end of it. The session can last up to an hour, and other specific treatment equipment may also be used to supplement the treatment if necessary. The combination of the above treatments is selected to significantly reduce pain and get you started on the right track to recovery.
In some cases, you may also be moved to our dedicated physical therapy and rehabilitation training room. This is a a new wide, spacious area we’ve opened where our therapist can demonstrate stretches and exercises with you in one-on-one sessions to help improve your technique and give you tips to prevent the same issue from arising again in the future.
After the deep tissue massage session, you’ll have a post-massage examination with your therapist. They’ll give you a summary and rundown of the bad habits you may have formed and how that’s affected the bones and muscles in your body. They’ll also note how your body is different after having done the therapy, and what to look out for to prevent straying back into these habits and causing additional damage. You may also be advised to return for further sessions if your ailments are severe and you are not comfortable practicing the exercises or stretches alone at home.
Below is a quick video on the treatment procedures you can typically expect at our clinic.
Is deep tissue massage right for me?
While we shouldn’t be quick to classify every type of pain to be chronic, it’s fairly simple to find out if it is. Simply ask yourself the following questions:
- Have I been experiencing pain in the same area over a long period of time?
- Is the pain recurring? After traditional treatment, does it return after a few days?
If the answer to both of those questions are “yes”, then we’d recommend you seek out help from a specialist immediately. While Deep Tissue Massage aims to relieve pain and help you recover from it, there are a few other benefits as well: improved flexibility, lower risk of injury, and even a heightened circulatory system.
If you simply aren’t sure if you are suffering from chronic pain or not, or just want to get a second opinion, simply give us a call and we’ll clear things up for you and offer clarity on your situation – regardless of whether you go through with a treatment or not.
Pain Away Clinic is amongst Thailand’s leading pain relief clinics. Patients come to get treatment for all types of pain every day, and all of them leave feeling much better when they came in. You can read some of their stories here. We are more than happy to give you a quick consultation if you’ve got any questions or are simply looking to get a professional opinion.
Feel free to reach out to us, or come on down to our clinic at Asoke, Bangkok so that we can help you get a proper diagnosis and find you an effective treatment plan to speed up your recovery.
