Circulation is responsible for directing life-supporting blood throughout your body 24 hours a day. It’s is what allows your heart to pump blood, your brain to function and your body to move around. When experiencing bad circulation, it can be down to a few bad habits, such as smoking tobacco, poor diet, long periods of inactivity or lack of exercise.
The first signs you will usually experience are found in your legs and feet, for example:
- Numbness or tingling
- Feeling tired or cramping during activities
- Cramping during inactivity
- Swelling and achiness
- Changes in skin temperature, causing persistent coldness
How is this affecting me?
Osteopathy surrounds the belief that your body has the natural talents to self-regulate and self-heal itself. However, to successfully do this, your body needs to be able to circulate all its fluids and liquids, such as blood and digestive juices, as these are essential for carrying life-sustaining compounds around your body.
If there are faults in the body’s structure, it can affect how fluids circulate and thus prevent the body from being able to heal itself.
Osteopathy pushes your body to continue efficient circulation through massaging, stretching and manipulation of the muscles. Your osteopath will search for the source of disruption, which is making circulation difficult, and this will be the focus of your treatment.
How can osteopathy help?
It is not just circulatory problems that osteopathy may be able to help with, but other irregularities caused by ageing or illness.
As you grow older, your body slowly begins to lose its power to efficiently self-regulate and self-heal. There can be lots of reasons for this, such as:
- Childbirth
- Accidents
- Repetitive activity
- Illness
- Prolonged influence of posture
- Surgical scarring
- Effects of both mental and physical stress
However, if allowed, your body can heal itself. Old injuries can often cause scarring as they heal, which can pull on surrounding tissue. However, with the help of osteopathy, precise techniques can be used to help clear away the tensions from both old and new injuries.
Once the tension is released, your body will rediscover its natural ability to function independently as it begins to consume sufficient oxygen and nutrition again, therefore restarting the self-healing process.
Here at Solihull Osteopathic Practice, we provide specialist osteopathic treatments to help with a variety of issues, including bad circulation. For further information get in touch with our team on 0121 705 4499.