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

Simple Neck Exercises

Neck problems are very common with neck, head, upper back, shoulder and arm pain all possibly referred from the cervical spine discs, joints, ligaments and muscles. The cervical spine is a long column with a heavy weight (the head) balanced at one end, a process that demands good movements and strong muscular control to achieve effectively without pain. Neck pain is commonly secondary to poor posture over a long period of time such as working at an office desk or kitchen worktop, where the neck has to maintain one posture for much longer than is helpful.

It can be helpful to perform simple neck exercises every day to maintain the ranges of motion of all the cervical joints and other structures within normal limits. Different parts of the cervical spine are specialised for different movements and it is important to make sure that the specific movements for each joint are practised daily. The upper neck vertebrae are specialised for rotation as moving the head round to look at something is a very important ability, and there is a small amount of a nodding movement here also. Further down the neck the focus is more on forward and back movements functionally adapted for looking up and down.

Falls and Healthy Bones

Falling in adults is an important matter with involvement of around 30% of people over sixty-five years old and half of those over eighty-five years. There are significant risks to falling for elderly people, with many much older people dying and or suffering loss of mobility or other problems. Ninety percent of hip fractures are caused by falling and this comes with a very high cost both personally and financially. Only twenty percent of people who fracture their hip recover well enough to attain their previous level of functional abilities which includes walking. There may be many reasons for a person falling and the evidence for the many interventions proposed being effective is not very good.

Physiotherapists prescribe exercise programmes as part of their main arsenal of skills, with good evidence that well designed programmes which include training balance and strength can be effective at reducing falls in the community. Patient access to assessment and treatment by a physiotherapist is however variable in the UK, with hip fracture patients likely to receive this (due to admission to hospital) but patients with non-hip fractures are much less likely to receive this even when admitted. Physios have a much greater role in this matter which they have not taken up.