Glasgow Osteopath

About the Perrin Technique

Daniel Gerber — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:51:00 +0000

How the Perrin Technique helps in the treatment on ME/CFS

The Perrin Technique is a clinically trialled osteopathic approach to the treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) / M.E. (Myalgic Encephalopathy).

The treatment manually stimulates the fluid movement through the brain and spinal cord. Manipulation of the spine further aids drainage of toxins out of the cerebrospinal fluid. Massage of the soft tissues in the head, neck, back and chest direct all the toxins out of the lymphatic system and into the blood, where the blood is purified by the liver.

Eventually with no toxins affecting the brain, the sympathetic nervous system begins to function correctly, and providing the patients do not overstrain themselves their symptoms should gradually improve and in time patients can become totally symptom free.

Reflection on a Life taken by CFS

Daniel Gerber — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:38:06 +0000

Inquest implicates CFS in death

A couple of weeks ago I was upset to read of the death of Lois Owen at the age of 34 from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), but I was able to take something away something that possibly could be seen as a slight ray of sunshine.

A report of the inquest into her death published in the Derby Telegraph illustrates that CFS far from being an excuse for lazy people to drop out. Here was a young woman who while she had CFS went to University and graduated with a first class degree (Do you have any idea how hard that is). She wrote a book and also set up her own business. Does this sound like a lazy person. I don’t think so.

Her family and health care team took her illness seriously. Rather that CBT and GET which a great number of people with CFS have found to be ineffective, they recommended rest. While recent (poor) research doesn’t agree with rest or pacing a lot of people in my experience find this to be the best way of managing their illness. The benefit of pacing is seen in a survey carried out by the ME association. (pages 8,9,10 make interesting reading)

The Ray of sunshine I was speaking about. Well that is bitter-sweet, but one of the causes of her death was listed as CFS. I hope that now it is further acknowledged that CFS has the potential to kill, or at least is seen as something that can contribute towards someones death.

I also hope that politicians, heath boards and health policy makers will start to take greater notice of the people with CFS and start lobbying for and finding money for research into a diagnosis and treatment for this debilitating disease.

Through twitter I’m going to pass this post along with the inquest report to Scottish government ministers with a heath remit. Their details are below.

I’m going to start with

Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) MSP, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary of Health and Wellbeing.
Michael Matheson (@MathesonMichael),MSP, Public Health Minister in the Scottish Government
Shona Robison (@ShonaRobison), MSP, Minister for Public Health

Why don’t you join me?

Please note

I had reservations about publishing this, but after talking to more people with ME/CFS and hearing some of their stories I decided to.
I have only referred to CFS (not ME or CFS/ME) as this is what’s in the inquest report.

The Perrin Technique

Daniel Gerber — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:16:52 +0000

The Perrin Technique for ME/CFS

I’ve Ignored this part of the site too long time. Planning on a lot more content. I have some ideas for content, but I’d also like to know what would you like to read about. You can contact me with your suggestions by clicking here. Just use bullet points if you want.

This is to get you thinking

I have trouble Writing about ME/CFS. Everyone seems to have an opinion. Some are very vehment in defense of they’re diagnosis, view or treatment. That’s why I’m asking you what you’d like to read about.

First of all there’s the names ME/CFS, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue syndrome, NeuroME, CFIDS, Fibromyalgia. These are just the names I can quickly think of it’s endless.

Are these all the same condition? Does it depend on who diagnoses it? What do you think about this?

Date written Thursday 26 April

Annoucing Our First Sponsored Athlete.

Daniel Gerber — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:03:02 +0000

Glasgow Osteopath is really happy to announce that we are now sponsoring^*one of Scotland’s top Ultra-runners – Paul Giblin (twitter @pyllon)

Paul trusted me to treat him over his first season of Ultra events including the 96 mile West Highland Way Race and his results speak for themself. Paul completed 7 Ultra marathons in 2011, and finished 3^rd overall in the Scottish Ultra Marathon Series. Highlights include a win at the 55 mile Cateran Ultra and a top 5 finish at the infamous West Highland Way race.

Paul’s training and competition schedule is gruelling and my treatment is tailored to meet the demands of a packed 9-month plan. This involves race preparation treatments, techniques to speed up recovery, general maintenance and dealing with issues as they arise – such as ‘emergency’ muscle treatment that on one occasion would have meant he couldn’t compete.

If Paul trusts me to maintain his body throughout the season it means he can focus on training and racing – helping him achieve his ambitions for the year. No matter what the distance, from 5K to marathon (and beyond), I believe I can help to keep you training so that you get the most out of your running.

If you’d like to know more about how I could support your training plan send me an email Osteopath Glasgow or call me to discuss – I love to talk running!

We’ll keep you updated on Paul’s progress through the year including links to his ultra-running blog.

GlasgowOsteo Lindt Easter Bunny Competition

Daniel Gerber — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:44:47 +0000

Osteopaths Chocolate Easter Bunny Competition

The competition

Here at Osteopath Glasgow we’re having a little Foursquare competition in time for Easter. The thing is I don’t want you to do it from Glasgow osteopath clinic which is located next to Queen Street Station in Glasgow. I want you to do it from as far away as possible!

The Prize

For first prize there’s a large Lindt chocolate bunny. It stands over 30cm tall and weighs over 2lbs (1k). There’s also a second prize of a smaller chocolate bunny.

What you have to do

Check in on Foursquare to Osteopath Glasgow from as far away as you can. If you don’t have foursquare on your phone you can download it here.
Take a photo of where you are and also add a short description (Street name and shop/street number)
You will also need to “share with friends” and
If on twitter use the #glasgowosteo.

There are no limits to the number of times you can enter. We do have a second prize for the person that checks in the most!

So happy check-ins.

Competition closes on the April 3 2012. prize can be collected from April 5th Judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding this.

The photo is needed so I can check on Google street view to verify furthest person away and the twitter #glasgowosteo will allow me notify you easily when you win.

Stretching to stop injury?

Daniel Gerber — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:53:43 +0000

Does Stretching Stop Injuries?

We’re often told to stretch,that it will reduce pain or that stretching will benefit our sport or that it may reduce the incidence of sports injuries. A quick google search suggested other benefits. In this post I’m going to take a look at some of the suggested benefits of stretching. I’ve grouped some of them together, as in my opinion some of the suggested benefits overlap.

Increases flexibility; One of stretchings main benefits is to increase length of a muscle or the range of motion across a joint. This appears to be true, if the stretch is performed correctly. Although in my opinion most stretches aren’t specific enough to work on trigger points, or through scar tissue. Care also needs to be taken as some research has shown that injury can happen from being too flexible, the same is true from being too inflexible.

Reduces muscle imbalance; This should be taken in tandem with increasing flexibility and as part of an overall balancing and flexibility program.

Improves circulation; This is an interesting one. I normally like to think of, and describe muscles as a sponge. Imagine taking a sponge and squeezing it in to a ball and lowering it into a bucket of water. Now take it out. No water runs out, because no water has soaked in. Now exchange the squeezed sponge for a tight muscle. Blood would have greater trouble flowing in, and through the muscle possibly resulting in increased blood pressure. When you compare that to a non squeezed sponge and how easily the water flows in and out it would seem to make sense to stretch a muscle to aid blood flow. This may also help increase recovery rates.

Decreases anxiety and stress, relaxes muscles, can give you an overall feeling of well-being; This I believe is as part of a relaxation or meditation routine. There may be some endorphin release associated with stretching, or it could be the time-out taken from your life while stretching helps you relax and releases tension.

Reduces risk of injury; There is actually very little evidence for this. particularly for stretching prior to exercise. Although Stretching can help improve flexibility, and better flexibility may improve your performance in physical activities or decrease your risk of injuries by helping your joints move through their full range of motion. For instance, imagine the muscles in your calf attaching to your Achilles tendon are tight and lack flexibility. If you do a lot of hill walking, your foot may not move through its full range of motion. Over time, this can increase your risk of tendonitis or tendonopathy in your Achilles tendon. Stretching the muscles that attach to your achilles tendon, may improve the range of motion in your ankle. This, in turn, may decrease the risk of microtrauma to your tendon that can lead to overload and injury.

So here we have 5 benefits of stretching. Will they help you reduce injury, make you faster or feel better? Try it and find out. I’d be interested to hear your experiences so leave a comment. Next post will be on the muscles you can’t stretch.

Getting Faster As You Get Older. The conclusion

Daniel Gerber — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:11:15 +0000

As this series of posts have progressed it may appear that it has been concentrating on older athletes, but what is in here is just as appropriate to all athletes. In preventing sports injuries I wrote about how we could build strong foundations to start your athletic endeavour and remain injury free. Here I’m going to write about time scale of osteopathic treatment intervention.

When I treat people I get asked 2 questions;

How many treatments will I need?
How frequently will I need to be treated?

The answer to how many treatment is, “It depends”. What does it depend on?

Distances covered; The distance you cover is proportional to the trauma your muscles receive. Think of it like weight training. The heavier the weight or the more repetitions done the more effect on the muscles. The same is true of training distances. Add hills, or a lower gear if cycling and the intensity increases (which take us to the next point).
How often you exercise; How often, type of exercise and intensity of that exercise are important, but probably more important is the rest and recovery. Here I will be thinking about where do you fit your rest and recovery phase into your exercise routine. Do you cross-train? This again factors into the abuse or maybe overuse your body receives
Your age; I explained in the last post about your body being the mirror of your life. Well the older you are, or the more you’ve “done” with your body the more potential problems that may need addressing
Existing problems; Is your body adapting because an existing problem. Do I have to treat this first? Most of the time I will treat the problem you’ve asked to me to treat first (I have to try to keep you to your training or competition schedule if you have one)

So the answer is it really depends on you. I treat each patient as an individual with individual expectations and treatment needs. What you want to achieve from your osteopathic treatments may vary making your treatment plan very different from anyone elses.

How frequently do you need treatment? I normally treat weekly to start with then move to fortnightly appointments . Some patients elect to have scheduled maintenance treatments to keep their competitive edge and to try to reduce the likelihood on injury.

If you’re not sure if an osteopath can help you why not book in for a free 15 minute assessment. It will give me a chance to find out about you and what you need. It will also allow me to tell you what I think could help you.

Getting Faster as you get older (pt2) The Even Better News

Daniel Gerber — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:48:16 +0000

Back to Part 1

What an osteopath would do to make you faster

In part one I wrote about muscle cell efficiency and decreases in muscle economy. Now I’m going to write about how me as an osteopath can help improve muscle economy through efficient movement by increasing flexibility.

An osteopathic principle believes that your muscles are a mirror of your life. What does this mean to you and why should it make you faster? Every thing you have done is “trapped” within your muscles. Every strain, pull and injury. All the times you overused, abused, mis-used your body. The hours you’ve spent sitting at a desk, on a sofa or stuck in a car in traffic. It’s all held in the muscles, making them stiffer, tighter and feeling older. These are inefficient muscles. It takes a greater effort to move them.

To move a joint the muscle on one side has to contract to pull it, at the same time the muscle on the other side has to relax to allow the movement. If the relaxing muscle is tight and inflexible it will require greater effort from the contracting muscle to allow the movement. Your economy of movement will be decreased requiring greater effort or power and decreases to your stamina.

Stretching can play a part in decreasing the inflexibility, but only a part if we consider muscle tightness in terms of structural and functional changes.

A muscle spasm could be thought of as a functional change. The muscle contracts to protect the area from further injury or insult. It’s normally short-lived and the muscle returns to its normal length.

A structural change is when the muscles form changes more permanently. There are studies showing the cellular structural changes associated with tennis elbow. It is also thought that shin splints can in part be caused by trauma and scar tissue formation in the shin muscles. Trigger points are another example of what I would call structural changes to muscles. All these examples leave the muscle either shortened or with shortened areas that don’t respond well to stretching. I also believe that training without stretching can lead to structurally shortened muscle.

This is where an osteopath can help. Working through your muscles may help return your muscles to more norm state, breaking down any restrictions to movement helping you move more efficiently.

One of my patients demonstrated that possible effects of this. He came in with left-sided low back, buttock, groin and leg pain. I treated the problems on that side and while training on a turbo trainer he noted

“Did 15mins singe leg spins this morning. Left side has more power and comfort with 10% more rpm.”

While I know this isn’t conclusive it does give me a way to start to measure improvements.

An osteopath won’t just look at your legs. They may also look at your back and pelvis to get that working properly. This would allow it to integrate with your improved leg movements making your whole running gait more efficient.

Why stop there? An osteopath can also look at your ribs and diaphragm. Loosening your diaphragm, which is your main breathing muscle, could give you a fuller breath. Working through the muscles between the ribs and the rib attachments may also allow your chest to expand more again allowing more air in.

So the other suggestion in the experiment’s conclusion, is to do some weights to improve your breathing. I’d like to suggest hold off on the weights. Get what’s there working properly and watch those efficiency gains. Then decide if you really need to do the weights. After all you’re going to be carrying the weight gain on inefficient legs.

The list is almost endless of what an osteopath could improve. The next post is going to be on what to expect when you visit an osteopath and a likely time frame for treatment. Part 3 out now

book an appointment

Getting Faster as you get older? The good news

Daniel Gerber — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:37:33 +0000

Research shows that you can run faster.

Does age automatically mean that there’s a decline in our athletic endeavors? A commonly held belief is the older we get the poorer our sporting performance gets, but this isn’t necessarily true and I believe that osteopathy can help all runners and other athletes whatever their age maintain their speed and possibly reduce the impact of injury.

A recent post in the NY Times reported on some good news for older runners. The results from the experiment on aging factors and running economy suggest that ‘age-related declines in running performance are associated with declines in maximal and submaximal cardiorespiratory variables and declines in strength and power, not because of declines in running economy.’

What may be confusing to a lay person is that they’re confusing economy and efficiency and muscle with muscle cells.

What they meant by this is your muscles cells don’t lose efficiency. ie older muscles cells use oxygen as well as younger muscles.

In fact muscles that have been trained for endurance events use oxygen more efficiently. The Genetics and Molecular Biology of Muscle Adaptation (Advances in Sport and Exercise Science) highlights research that shows that mitochondria, the powerhouse of a cell, do their job better the more the muscle is used, or to put it another way, the older the muscles and the person using the muscle is, the greater the potential for speed and endurance.

So according to the experiment, the decline doesn’t come from decreases in the efficiency of the muscle cells, it comes from the decline of your heart and lungs and the decline in strength and power of your muscles. Or to put it my way the decline comes from decreases in the economy of effort used during movement.

The experiment noted that older runners had decreased upper body strength compared to younger runners and that while they both had similar leg power, the older runners had decreased leg flexibility.

While using your arms does help pump your lungs, there doesn’t appear to be any correlation between upper body muscle mass or power and respiratory efficiency. The movement of the rib cage and the diaphragm (the main respiratory muscle) were not assessed in this study, but age can and does tighten these leading to decreased flexibility there as well.

Correcting these decreases in flexibility is where an osteopath could play a crucial role in maintaining your athletic performance. How is what I’m going to talk about in Part 2 >

Your First Osteopathic Treatment

Daniel Gerber — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:09:59 +0000

Osteopathy – What to expect at your first appointment.

During your initial consultation the osteopath will spend time getting to know you and whatever problems you may have. He will ask a series of questions as he will need to know about your previous medical history, current medication and, most importantly, details of the condition that you need help with now.

The osteopath will then examine you, using various osteopathic, orthopaedic, neurologica techniques to help determine the origin of pain. The osteopath will then discuss his diagnosis with you and, if necessary, the most effective treatment for your condition.
For the examination the osteopath may need you to ask you to undress to your underwear. If you feel uncomfortable doing this shorts and T-shirt or even a swimming costume may be worn although it is worth remembering that to do a thorough examination any osteopath with need to be able to see your back.

If you want to bring someone to accompany you during your visit we are always very happy to have them.