Manual Therapy for Back Pain
Osteopathy, physiotherapy, or chiropractic — which is right for you?
The myBackPain assessment identifies the most likely cause of your pain and guides you toward the treatment approach with the best evidence for your specific presentation.
What manual therapy can achieve
What manual therapy cannot do
- Cure structural degeneration — disc wear, facet arthrosis, and bony changes are structural. Manual therapy manages the functional consequences but cannot reverse the structural change.
- Replace active rehabilitation — passive treatment alone does not produce lasting change. The real work happens in rehabilitation, not on the treatment table.
- Provide indefinite maintenance — treatment that continues indefinitely without improvement in function is not providing lasting benefit.
- Treat conditions outside scope — inflammatory conditions, malignancy, infection, and serious neurological compromise require medical management.
Choosing the right practitioner
In practice, the differences between osteopathy, physiotherapy, and chiropractic are less significant than the differences between individual practitioners within each profession. The most important factors are the practitioner’s clinical reasoning skills, their willingness to explain their findings, their integration of exercise and self-management into the treatment plan, and their ability to identify when referral is needed. A good practitioner in any of the three disciplines will produce better outcomes than a poor practitioner in any of them.
Find out which treatment is most appropriate for your specific back pain
The myBackPain assessment identifies the most likely cause of your pain — and guides you toward the treatment approaches with the best evidence for your specific presentation.