Hawkes Physiotherapy Blog

As I practice acupuncture I thought that it was about time that I wrote a blog article on the subject. I know it’s a long time coming but Physiotherapy is such a broad subject! There is way too much to cover! So for my first blog article on acupuncture I thought that it would be best to discuss acupuncture in general, to give you an understanding of what it is and how it works. In future articles I can discuss acupuncture relating to specific problems such as low back pain etc. Acupuncture is commonly used within physiotherapy as part of the multimodal management of pain and injury. The purpose of acupuncture in physiotherapy is to enhance normal physiotherapy treatments such as exercise to promote recovery and improve quality of life. Now Physiotherapists are bound by clinical evidence and so it is important that acupuncture stands up to the scrutiny of research. This article and future articles will try to guide us, as to whether acupuncture is evidence based.

I decided to write this article more as a question than an answer because I don’t think anyone truly knows the answer. First things first, what is a placebo? Placebo: “A medicine or procedure prescribed for the psychological benefit to the patient rather than for any physiological effect.” Or “A substance that has no therapeutic effect, used as a control in testing new drugs.” Or “A measure designed merely to humour or placate someone.” (Oxford Dictionary) Straight away we have encountered a problem in the first sentence “prescribed for psychological benefit rather than for any physiological effect.” Well if you look at the argument about placebo used in research or clinical practice some people say “that’s just a placebo” but the patient has gained physiological benefit in a lot of cases. For example: Yang et al (2014) found that both placebo and real acupuncture, were found to be more effective than the control group but real acupuncture when co

Well it’s that time again. What is your New Year’s resolution? Unfortunately the statistics tell us that we are very likely not to stick to it, in fact it’s an 80% failure rate!! Now you might be thinking, “What is a Physio doing talking about New Year’s resolutions?” Well there is a good reason, I often see the people who decided to get fit or lose weight after it all goes wrong.  It is all too common that I see people who have all that motivation to change the world in a day and go mad from day one and over train, progress too quickly and break down injured. Never mind that as a Physio I understand the body and can advise on the specifics to help you to achieve your New Years’s resolutions. If you want to get fit If you want to lose weight If you want to de-stress If you want to look after yourself for once If you want to get that niggle sorted once and for all. I can help you with all of these and more.  You only have to look at the pr