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Navigate: FAQ Home Page > Doctor Visits & Confidentiality > Integrative Manual Therapy
Posted on: 05/05/2010
Question
Can Integrative Manual Therapy help with back pain? Or anxiety and fatigue?
Answer
Integrative Manual Therapy (IMT) may help with back pain. It has been referred to as "advanced" physician therapy in some publications. However, for a 15-year-old woman, the issue of anxiety and fatigue is complicated and deserves a through evaluation by a medical physician. You could be anemic, have thyroid disease or other illness that can reasonably only be diagnosed and treated by a physician.
The power of touch is impressive as is the power of belief. Often undergoing any manual or hands-on therapy offers some improvement of symptoms for many people.
Integrative Manual Therapy is one of the many physical modalities that offer to diagnose and treat a wide variety of illness and disease. IMT offers to diagnose chronic physical problems on the basis of touch and manipulation. To quote from the IMT Association web site: "Practitioners of IMT assess clients by using their hands. They feel the body?s circadian biologic rhythms and movements by gently placing their hands on the client. (One such example of these rhythms is the heart beat.) Just as with all other aspects of IMT, the assessment is integrative, taking into account the multiple, complex systems of the entire human body."
We live in an age where the basic medical, biologic and physiologic sciences are gaining a detailed understanding of human basic physiology, disease and disability at a geometric rate. The tools available to physicians and researchers include the MRI, CAT scan, x-ray, blood chemistry and measurement, PET scans as well as the experience of often a decade of training with very ill and seriously injured patients.
The standard of medical science and health care is now Evidence Based Medicine. For any patient of any practitioner or therapy including your personal physician or doctor (often referred to Western Medicine or Allopathic Medicine physician) the question to ask is what large-scale, double-blind studies support the evaluation and therapy you are recommending for me and the problem I am bringing to you. Large-scale, double-blinded roughly means hundreds or thousands of patients treated and compared with alternate treatment or no treatment and the researcher is "blinded" to the therapy each research subject (patient) receives to avoid bias when performing the final evaluation.
I hope this helps and we all wish you well. I would suggest you start with your doctor and then perhaps work with other physical modalities of treatment.
The power of touch is impressive as is the power of belief. Often undergoing any manual or hands-on therapy offers some improvement of symptoms for many people.
Integrative Manual Therapy is one of the many physical modalities that offer to diagnose and treat a wide variety of illness and disease. IMT offers to diagnose chronic physical problems on the basis of touch and manipulation. To quote from the IMT Association web site: "Practitioners of IMT assess clients by using their hands. They feel the body?s circadian biologic rhythms and movements by gently placing their hands on the client. (One such example of these rhythms is the heart beat.) Just as with all other aspects of IMT, the assessment is integrative, taking into account the multiple, complex systems of the entire human body."
We live in an age where the basic medical, biologic and physiologic sciences are gaining a detailed understanding of human basic physiology, disease and disability at a geometric rate. The tools available to physicians and researchers include the MRI, CAT scan, x-ray, blood chemistry and measurement, PET scans as well as the experience of often a decade of training with very ill and seriously injured patients.
The standard of medical science and health care is now Evidence Based Medicine. For any patient of any practitioner or therapy including your personal physician or doctor (often referred to Western Medicine or Allopathic Medicine physician) the question to ask is what large-scale, double-blind studies support the evaluation and therapy you are recommending for me and the problem I am bringing to you. Large-scale, double-blinded roughly means hundreds or thousands of patients treated and compared with alternate treatment or no treatment and the researcher is "blinded" to the therapy each research subject (patient) receives to avoid bias when performing the final evaluation.
I hope this helps and we all wish you well. I would suggest you start with your doctor and then perhaps work with other physical modalities of treatment.