The benefits of manual therapy

We hear a lot about this concept, but what is manual therapy really? It encompasses many confusing things, and for years I myself had a misconception of the concept.

For a long time I thought manual therapy was just techniques borrowed from osteopathy. At school, we had a teacher who is a physiotherapist and osteopath and who gave us courses in manual therapy. He mainly showed us the manipulations and mobilizations used in osteopathy. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that manual therapy encompassed much more than the techniques we learned at school.

To put it simply, manual therapy encompasses all the manual techniques used by a healthcare professional such as a physiotherapist, osteopath or chiropractor… Manual therapy encompasses many different techniques, such as: massage, mobilization, passive stretching (performed by the therapist while the patient does little or nothing), spinal manipulation, or manipulation of the upper or lower limbs, and many other techniques, as the list is not exhaustive. It’s part of the “hands-on” concept, i.e. the therapist’s hands on the patient’s body. Hands-on is the opposite of hands-off, which means that the therapist does not touch the patient.