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

Hand Injuries

Hand injuries are very important as the hand is such a vital functional part of human anatomy, with an injury to the hand causing a significant degree of disability in the short term and potentially over the long term. The hand is exposed to a very large number of risks in normal and work life, from burns to cuts to crushing, which can cause a wide variation in injuries from soft tissue damage, tendon transection or rupture to fractures of any of the bones of the hand. In many cases several types of injury will coexist in the damaged hand.

Because our hands are the medium by which we interact with much of the world they are often placed in situations which render them vulnerable to injury. They are a combination of a large number of small bones and joints with complex ligamentous, tendinous and muscular components optimised to perform the multiple skilled manual functions we require. All the complex functioning of the hand results from the successful interplay of all the anatomical components working in very tight spaces. Any disruption of a part of the hand typically has knock on effects for the whole unit.

Intervertebral Discs and Ageing

Ageing starts early in the discs and proceeds through life. Initially a loss of proteoglycan occurs, and as these chemicals attract and hold water into the centre of the discs, a degree of loss of hydration steadily occurs. The collagenous tissues lose some of their suppleness and resistance, becoming more brittle and more likely to suffer injury. As the discs have no central blood supply and rely on nutrition and oxygen diffusing in, a limitation of this process will accelerate the degenerative process going on in the disc centres. The tops and bottoms of the vertebrae, the endplates, are cartilage but can become calcified, further reducing supplies to the nucleus inside.

The outer part of the disc, the annulus, has layers of collagen material and these thicken and can develop defects. Overall the central disc material becomes drier, fibrosed and stiffer with a smaller volume as it loses water, throwing compressive forces onto the back of the disc annulus. The annulus becomes both stiffer and weaker with age, the increased stiffness perhaps offset by the increase in defects in the disc wall with time. Studies of discs have shown that they do not generally decrease in height with age.