FAQs

If you can’t find an answer to your question below, then please, do get in touch. We’re happy to speak to you, and you will get an honest answer, based upon professional knowledge and experience, gained over years.

Are we registered and regulated by a professional organisation?

As Chartered Physiotherapists, we are governed and regulated by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and the Health and Care Professions Council – a government-appointed organisation whose role to ensure members comply with strict professional rules of conduct and practice.
Chartered Physiotherapist is a protected title, so ensure you are aware of this fact when you decide who you are going to see to help you.

Do I need to get a Doctors’ referral to come for Physiotherapy?

No, you do not, unless your insurance company stipulates that you do (check with your insurer), or if you wish to discuss your symptoms with your doctor. Otherwise, you can come directly to us. If we have any concerns about how you present to us and think that you need to speak to your doctor, then we will advise you of this.

An important part of our role is to screen our clients for any possible non-musculoskeletal sources of problems, which clients may present with. As Chartered Physiotherapists we gain a great deal of experience, as part of our training, across the wide spectrum of medical specialities, in hospital settings.

This experience affords us a depth of knowledge, which others, who deal with injury management, do not get.

‘Ive had Physiotherapy before, and it didn’t help.’; ‘I waited ages to see someone and all I got was a sheet of exercises and told to come back in a month.’; What will you do differently?

These are questions, and observation, frequently asked and made. Be assured that Focus Physiotherapy is very definitely a ‘hands-on’ practice, with that approach to how we manage injury and recovery. We will give you appropriate exercise, as part of your treatment and recovery programme, but this is a part of the process, not the whole. There seems to be a population of some Physios who just provide exercises. Well, that is not Physiotherapy, that’s exercise prescription! Our approach is to use manual therapy to improve how the musculoskeletal system works, and then use targeted exercise to assist this process, to reinforce better movement patterns, improve strength and conditioning of soft tissues or both.

‘I’ve been told that I have wear and tear, degenerative changes or arthritis. Is there anything that can be done to help me?’

This is a frequently asked question. The important fact, based upon medical research, is that pretty much everybody gets signs of ‘wear and tear’, it’s a normal state of play, but not everybody gets pain! It is also that case that people get pain without any signs of wear and tear, arthritis, or degeneration.

In my experience, the advice that you’ve got wear and tear/arthritis/degenerative joints is an, often, over-simplified explanation, often given to individuals, to explain their symptoms. (There is some correlation to individuals who have marked signs of degeneration). The issue, I find with this, is, that people tend to come away from a consultation with the feeling that there is nothing that can be done, and they have to live with their symptoms.

The good news is that this is, therefore, also, not always the case.

Treatment designed to improve how the joints and tissues move, means that we will be addressing the reason why you are getting pains. The pain is there as a result of abnormal loading of structures, so improve the movement, you will improve the pain.
The arthritis is the response that the system has to those abnormal loads, so if we improve how we move, making it more comfortable, then we are addressing the root cause of these sorts of problems.