Chiropractor vs Physical Therapy Neck Pain

While chiropractic care and physiotherapy have many similarities, there are also some main differences to consider when deciding whether a chiropractor vs physical therapy for neck pain is right for you. After an accident, injury, or when experiencing chronic neck pain, seeking a proper treatment option is critical to your recovery and the future of your health and wellness. Dive into the benefits and rehabilitation techniques of both physical therapy treatment and chiropractic treatment to make the best informed decision for your pain relief. 

What is Chiropractic Care?

Chiropractic care is a non-invasive treatment plan that uses gentle joint manipulation and spinal adjustment to treat chronic pain, move the body into alignment, recover from injury, and promote overall health throughout the body. This type of treatment plan utilized hands-on manipulation to provide a safe and effective form of therapy to family members of all ages. 

Chiropractic therapy can treat aches and pains from everyday life, promote surgery recovery, and provide an alternative to medical treatment or medication for some issues. 

Chiropractic Care for Neck Pain

Chiropractors specialize in the neck, spine, and back, making them experts when it comes to issues with the bones or joints. Sessions with a chiropractor will feature an evaluation, the development of a treatment plan for your specific issues, and appropriate chiropractic adjustments to improve health and reduce pain. 

Treatments

Neck pain can arise from a variety of sources, from injury to everyday strain. For most, neck pain is due to misalignment of the spinal column, compression of the joints, or muscular strain in the body. Chiropractic care for patients with neck issues will most likely consist of spinal manipulation of the vertebrae to improve alignment. This can relieve pinched nerves, joint pain or compression, and alleviate neck pain due to these issues. 

For those patients who are looking for rehabilitative care after previous injury or surgery can also benefit from a chiropractic approach to treatment. Proper alignment of the spine and neck can help promote healing blood flow throughout the body, reduce inflammation, and lower strain while a neck injury or surgery heals. 

What is Physical Therapy?  

There are many similarities between chiropractic and physiotherapist’s approaches to treatment. Both comprehensive treatments are aimed at a primary goal of helping patients recover through a holistic approach to medicine. While not always avoidable, both seek to give patients an alternative to medication or surgical options. 

Physical Therapy for Neck Pain

A physical therapy program will provide pain relief through gentle exercises and massage therapy to help mobilize the muscles in an effected area. This can help to reduce muscle pain and promote natural healing in the body. Physiotherapy sessions tend to focus on healthy movement of the muscles for medical treatment.   

Treatments

Like many physiotherapy treatment techniques, a physical therapist’s treatment for people with neck pain will most likely focus on improving the movement, strain, and inflammation of the neck muscles. One treatment option will focus on massages to the effected muscle while another might work on stretches for a compressed muscle. 

Additional approaches to treatment might include gentle exercises to build muscular strength or movement regiments to work on physical rehabilitation for an injured or strained muscle. 

Similarities 

At the core of their treatment methods, chiropractic care and physical therapy have many things in common. A health care professional from either discipline will focus on a non-invasive and holistic plan for treating chronic pain or injury. Both fields focus on the core factor that has caused the patient’s chronic pain and work to alleviate that problem naturally within the body. 

Both physiotherapy and chiropractic treatment can provide a safe and effective alternative to medication or surgery to improve the daily life of someone with chronic pain. 

Differences

The main difference between chiropractic therapy and physical therapy comes in the concentration. While physical therapy works with movement and the soft muscles, chiropractic health professionals focus on the spine, joints, and skeletal system for types of treatment. While both come with their own forms of treatment, each patient will need to evaluate which treatment plan is best for them.