Physiotherapists in Maidenhead treat many different conditions including the issues profiled below.

Spinal Posture

Spinal posture can mean two main things, one being the shape and orientation of the curves in the spine and two being the angle that the whole spine is aligned to the vertical. The minimum of muscle activity occurs when the trunk is balanced directly above the pelvis and any deviation from this requires muscle activity to increase to maintain position. As the main moving muscles of the spine are orientated lengthways like the spine itself, when they contract they generate significant compression forces through the spine. Contraction of these muscles in easy standing or sitting still generates forces through the lumbar spine that are twice the body weight above the area.

In sitting it makes little difference to the degree of muscle activity whether the lumbar spine is held arched to some degree (lumbar lordosis) or flexed (bent), the key point is whether the spine is vertically aligned or not. So leaning back with a lordosis or forwards with a flexed spine both generate high muscle forces, whilst sitting upright in either posture does not. Sitting positions all flex the lumbar spine, with the lower two lumbar levels being significantly flexed in these postures, even to the maximum of their movement.

Disc Pain

It is not possible to diagnose discogenic pain by clinical examination of a patient as there are no specific examination techniques for this condition. Various physiotherapy techniques, such as testing centralisation and peripheralisation, show some connections with having disc-related problems, but do not go as far as to solidly diagnose disc pain. The accepted way of diagnosing this type of problem is to attack the disc itself with techniques such as discography. Discography involves inserting a needle right into the disc and injecting a contrast material which will show up on x-ray examination. The most important point is that the test is only positive if it brings on the typical pain the patient is normally complaining of.

The injected material allows the shape of the nucleus to be seen inside the disc and whether there any problems with it. The discs nearby are also tested and they should be negative if there is to be sufficient confidence in the findings from the symptomatic disc. Internal disc disruption (IDD) is quoted as the underlying pathology responsible for lumbar pain of disc origin, where the internal structure of the disc is altered by fissures occurring radially from the centre towards the outside.