Did you know that you can enhance the benefits of a chiropractic adjustment with a therapeutic massage? Many people seek chiropractic adjustments for problems with headaches and pain in the back and neck. These problems can either be caused by an acute injury or due to a longstanding illness. Chiropractic adjustments help to rebalance the body by focusing on hard tissue, mostly by realigning the spine and other joints. Massage therapy, however, focuses on the treatment of soft tissue, such as muscles, tendons, and ligaments. While the two modalities work on different types of tissue in the body, they are complementary and can enhance the benefits of both.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine explains why massage is beneficial to your adjustment, “because of muscle memory, the soft tissue surrounding a misaligned vertebra, seeks to retain that misalignment because this requires less work than that required for the soft tissue to learn a new alignment. Therefore, when a chiropractic adjustment changes the alignment of the vertebrae, the surrounding muscles will try to pull them back into the equilibrium condition — the misalignment.”
In order to combat the misalignment and the adaptive response of the body (muscle memory), a massage will assist in retraining the muscles by focusing on the soft tissue while the adjustment with retrain the muscles by focusing on the hard tissue. Allowing both modalities to assist in the readjustment and balancing together is more beneficial and practical than expecting one by itself to completely correct any issues.
Chiropractic works great for back pain, sciatica, headaches, and more. Combined with massage therapy, the chiropractic adjustment may last longer and give you increased benefits. Chiropractic has been around for over a hundred years. And massage therapy has been around for thousands of years. For great overall health, combining the two therapies has longer lasting benefits.