I recently read a very interesting analogy about physiotherapy for overuse injuries and & a dripping tap! I thought it was an interesting way to look at physio and made real sense.

If you’ve got a dripping tap, you’ve got a couple of options.

Firstly you may put a bucket under the drip to collect the water or you can keep mopping it up. This is a great short term solution. The damage is contained and it doesn’t cost too much. But this isn’t great longer term. You’re just managing the problem without a long term solution. Like an injury, this is treating the symptoms of the problem.

But, as well as mopping up the leak, what you really need to do is find out why the tap is leaking and get it fixed, finding the cause of the problem and tackling it. Without doing this, you’ll be forever ‘mopping up’ and it will get pretty expensive with wasted water bills.

Overuse injuries can be looked at in a similar way. Pain is the dripping tap. You can take painkillers, you can rest – but this isn’t really tackling the problem of why you developed the injury in the first place. If all you’re doing is mopping up, you’re not actually fixing the leak. With overuse injuries, you need someone to look holistically at whats happening, identify the cause and offer solutions to rectify it and stop it happening again.

Overuse injuries occur because you’re doing something regularly and you body can’t cope with it, the demands you’re physically placing on your body are exceeding your body’s threshold to cope. So, if you’re suffering with an ongoing or long term overuse injury – do you want to be forever mopping up or do you want to get to the bottom of it and get it fixed? If you want a solution then give us a call. We get to the root of your problem, help relieve your symptoms but also address what’s really happening.