Find Your Minimum Effective Dose

In my five years of running my chiropractic practice, I’ve seen some patterns that seem to reoccur often. For example, most people who work at a desk have tight shoulders and a stiff upper back, most runners have a laundry list of tweaks and niggles (but this barely stops them from running!), and every lifter has an awesome story about the best workout they ever had.

In nearly every instance, when they visit me, my physiotherapist, or my registered massage therapist, they are looking for a solution to their problem - usually an issue with pain or dysfunction impacting their daily life.

We find the minimum effective dose for improvement

Part of the solution to my patients problem is finding the most efficient strategy to overcome their issue and get back to living life to the fullest.

I am a huge fan of the “minimum effective dose” when planning a cycle of treatment. Instead of prescribing 20 hands-on treatments and 1000000 new exercises, I’d prefer find the bare minimum we can do for awesome results.

At this point, we have the option to add more, whether it be chiropractic treatment, physiotherapy, or registered massage therapy. This keeps treatment affordable and prevents overwhelming people with too many big changes at once - this is also nearly impossible to track and figure out what’s working.

Our team combines physiotherapy, chiropractic care, and registered massage therapy to help you get out of the basement and build your floor.

We build the foundation before raising the roof

The goal of establishing the minimum effective dose is to “build the foundation” instead of “raising the roof”. By utilizing the minimum effective dose, we can ensure your foundation will support what you’re trying to achieve. By implementing a consistent plan of treatment and self-care, we can ensure that the physical demands of your favourite sport or activity (or just picking up the kids) won’t be enough to knock you on your ass.

This approach is very accessible for even the busiest parent, lawyer, computer engineer or high-level athlete. Having a good foundation lets us engage in new activity without worrying about injuring ourselves, because we know we maintain the necessary level of physical readiness.

The main downside to this approach is that it’s neither flashy nor fast. We can use manual therapy and hands-on care (physio, chiro, massage hands-on) for quick relief of symptoms, but the lasting changes take time.

For example, when someone comes in with a stiff and achy low back, we’ll absolute manipulate, get some blood flow going, and some massage to clear it up quick, but addressing the cause of the recurring back issues will take persistence and time for the body to adapt.

We might recommend daily 20 minute walks, 3x weekly mobility, and 2x weekly strengthening over the course of the next year. When we achieve 80% success on consistency, we can be pretty darn sure that back issue won’t be nearly as much of a problem anymore.

This longterm thinking creates actual change

Most of us know we can’t just ignore all the warning lights on the dash of the car - I mean you can, but probably not for very long before something breaks down. When you’re dealing with consistent flare ups of pain, and you’ve tried chiro, massage, physio, acupuncture, and everything else under the sun, it might be time to zoom out and look at how we can make a change that lasts longer than your next adjustment. It’s time to take ownership of your health and your body. There is no mechanic that can swap a body part when you decide to ignore it (maybe one day, I’m holding out for that Star Trek body scanner thing still).

The reason we’re banging on about building a stronger foundation is because it’s actually achievable, even for the busiest most stressed out person. We can make small, efficient, incremental changes that will have an enormous impact on our overall health. Think of all the cliches about small changes, a journey of a thousand mile starts with a single step, we eat an elephant one bite at a time etc. Not all of us will be able to set world records at the Olympics, but all of us can achieve a reasonable level of physical preparedness to ensure we are not susceptible to the challenges that frailty and a sedentary lifestyle will innevitably cause.

This longterm change is what we strive to do at Highlands Wellness and Sports Injury Clinic. Sure, we might see you for a longer time at the onset, but by the time we’re done working together, you’ll have everything you need to ensure you’re in control of your own muscle, joint, and nerve health.