Finding and treating the ROOT cause by looking at the whole picture
Do you feel like you have tried everything? Exhausted all options?
Perhaps you’ve been passed from one department to another to hear multiple differing opinions or maybe been told there is no medical cause behind your pain.
So, you’re left in the dark about what your problem is and, importantly, what needs to be done so that you can recover.
I understand and have worked with many people over the last 22+ years who have been in this situation.
A Different Approach to Chronic Pain
The common view is that when we have physical pain, the answers lie in hands-on treatments (massage, Chiropractic, Osteopathy, etc.), operations, and/or pain medications. This leads to the common assumption that if they don’t work, nothing can be done; you’re just going to have to live with it. In my experience, that may not be true.
Please allow me a few minutes of your time to explain my experience to date. It will help you understand how our approach will be different from any you’ve had so far and, importantly, to know if I’m the right match for you. To get the results you desire we’ll need to work as a team, with you taking an active role in your recovery. It is vitally important that you feel comfortable and relaxed with me as it forms part of the environment needed for your recovery.
I initially trained as a McTimoney Chiropractor graduating in 2001, so I started my career in hands-on treatments. However, I de-registered in 2022 as my career evolved into other areas. These Methods often provide longer lasting relief in relation to chronic and recurrent pain. I still practise the McTimoney Method when it is a necessary and essential part of your recovery.
What I discovered is this: in cases where someone needs a few treatments, they improve each time and the problem never recurs, then 100% in those incidences the root cause of their pain was purely mechanical.
The issue is, that this approach isn’t the best for those of you who:
- Never improve with treatments and there is no change in your symptoms at all.Experience a temporary worsening of your symptoms after treatment.
- Improvement is short-lived, ranging from a few hours to several weeks/months.
- Must have regular maintenance treatments to stay on top of everything.
- Find that certain events/triggers will set your pain off again.
These are the times when your pain will not purely be due to muscle tension/weakness, misalignments, wear and tear, or inflammation. Even though these things may be present, a bigger-picture approach is required to fully get to the root cause and create lasting improvement
If you’re already keen to meet me, get your questions answered and find out more, you can book a FREE 30-minute chat now. Please know there is absolutely no pressure or obligation to take treatment after this call. It has to be your decision and feel right for you, and if I think someone else will be a better fit, I’ll say so.
Otherwise, read on to discover what makes this treatment different and some examples of possible root causes behind chronic pain.
Do You Still Feel An Emotional Reaction To A Past Event?
If your pain started after a particular accident/injury/operation, does it bring up a negative emotional feeling, for example, fear, anxiety, or anger when you think about that event?
Do you still experience a feeling of shock?
The mere fact that you feel an emotion when you think about the event indicates that the physical and emotional are intertwined.
For example. You may have had a car accident and suffered whiplash. At the time of the accident, perhaps you were in shock as you couldn’t see the other driver coming. Maybe you felt angry with them because they weren’t paying attention. If you think about the event and emotions still come to the surface, those memories and linked emotions are stuck and being held within your body and can manifest as chronic pain.
There are several ways to gently release these negative emotions, often within minutes. When you release them, the internal stress associated with it is detached, and the loop stops repeating. You’ll now see those events differently; your body can begin to recover on a physical level, and other methods finally become effective.
There are several ways to do this that could be considered and discussed within a session, including PSYCH-K®, Systematic Kinesiology and Bach flower essences. These can all be carried out on Zoom or in person at our chronic pain clinic near Kingsbury Episcopi, Somerset.
Has An Accident or Operation Created Chronic Tension and Pain?
This is a different perspective on the point raised above, as it isn’t related to the emotion but rather to the mechanics of an overprotective body.
Survival and protection are the main jobs of our body and brain, but sometimes, they take things a bit too far, and this can cause problems.
Let me explain with this example. Say you have a shoulder issue where you don’t have a full range of movement. Lifting your arm is painful. This may be the aftereffects of a car accident. Here’s how:
One ligament for your liver (left triangular ligament) is in the area where your seatbelt crosses over your body. In a car accident, this jarring may cause the ligament to tense to preserve the position and function of your liver. After all, it is a vital organ. However, if this tension remains, it can cause pain and restriction in your arm and shoulder.
Why? Because fully raising your arm would create too much tension on the liver, which is attached to the tightened ligament. This ligament is also one of the attachments to your diaphragm beneath your lungs. So, your body protects you and your liver by causing pain when you try to lift your arm to prevent any harm to a vital organ. From your body’s point of view, it is better to survive, even if that means pain and restriction of movement.
Situations like this are fairly common and I would use Barral Institute Visceral release work which is very gentle and can address issues around internal organs, like this example. Every organ in your body is held in place by ligaments to your bones, and if these get tight and the movement of your internal organs is restricted, things can get very uncomfortable, and you’ll have no idea why.
Situations like this are fairly common and I would use Barral Institute Visceral release work which is very gentle and can address issues around internal organs, like this example. This may also be in conjunction with the McTimoney Method.
Every organ in your body is held in place by ligaments to your bones, and if these get tight and the movement of your internal organs restricted, things can get very uncomfortable, and you’ll have no idea why.
The other consideration here is scars that result from injury and surgery. This can be approached through ScarWork with Lorna Kennard-Wall, which releases the tension from scarring that is visible and also runs deeper into your body.
If you’ve ever had a tension headache or tight muscle you’ll appreciate the toll this constant tension from ligaments or scars can take and the chronic pain it may cause.
Is Food Causing or Increasing Your Chronic Pain?
Diet has such a major impact on our health, and I know you don’t want to hear it, but you may be eating foods that are causing a reaction, inflammation, and physical pain in your body.
I have personal experience of this. I was struggling with constant lower back, gluteal and ITB (top of your thighs on the outside of your leg) pain in my 20s. Turned out it was wheat. I tried all sorts, but only when I cut the wheat out did my constant pain plus insomnia and IBS fully resolve!
It was a revelation for me (at around 22) that it is possible to be awake for a whole day without feeling the constant want to sleep and need to lie down! I genuinely believed that was how my life would be forever. I had no idea there was a better way of living until I cut out the food completely!
I talk about this in more detail in this blog ‘Is IBS the cause of your lower back pain?’
Using Systematic Kinesiology muscle testing we can identify problem foods so you can exclude them and put an end to that cycle of inflammation whilst strengthing your system so that it can recover and become more resilient.
Does Your Body Need The Building Blocks For Recovery?
Pain and weakness can be a result of not having the building blocks for healthy functioning or repair of your muscles and joints. Sometimes, you need to add extra nutrients to support healing and proper function.
For example, a magnesium supplement could be just what you need to reduce inflammation, relax your muscles and provide them with the energy they need to function. Or you may need a digestive enzyme to help you digest your food fully and obtain the nutrients from what you eat.When your body has the ‘fuel’ it needs, it can get on with what it does best – heal and repair. Sometimes, this can mean that your pain resolves or that hands-on treatments are more effective because your body is able to hold and maintain the changes.
Using systematic kinesiology muscle testing, we can identify the supplements that are the most helpful to you specifically. We can work together on Zoom or in person at our chronic pain clinic near Kingsbury Episcopi, Somerset.
Is Stress or Worry Adding To Your Chronic Pain?
Do you often feel stressed out, frazzled or worried? Your physical pain may be related to life stresses.
For example, lower back pain can be related to feelings of insecurity, such as financial worries, threat of redundancy, relationship issues, etc. These can be past, present or future worries.
You’ve probably heard this and been told to “reduce or avoid stress”. Unfortunately, most of us cannot just remove the things causing us stress or worry. What you can do, however, is calm the subconscious mind. This allows you to see solutions or helps you to feel safe and secure in the here and now, and this can all help to resolve your physical pain. You can’t always remove the trigger of stress, but you can detach the link between the emotion and the physical pain and change your perception of the stress.
For this root cause I can use Systematic Kinesiology and PSYCH-K® chronic pain treatments that would both be beneficial. These can all be carried out on Zoom or in person at our chronic pain clinic near Kingsbury Episcopi, Somerset.
Does Your Body Have a Message For You?
Have you ever heard someone say your body knows way before your brain does? It’s true! Our bodies act as early warning signs, giving us signals that something isn’t right, physically, mentally, or environmentally.
The problem is that we humans have become very good at ignoring these signals and trying to treat the symptoms instead of getting curious about why. Think about some common sayings
- …is a pain in the neck
- I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders
- I just can’t stomach…..
Listen to the words you use to describe your issue. Often, the words we use are the key to finding and releasing the problem. We can uncover those pearls of wisdom and create a positive change or let go of the emotional/stress connection, which will allow your pain to subside.
Treatments for this type of chronic pain could include Bach flower essences, Systematic Kinesiology, and PSYCH-K®. These can all be carried out on Zoom or in person at our chronic pain clinic near Kingsbury Episcopi, Somerset.
Your Medical History and Symptoms Will Guide Us To Your Starting Point
Any chronic pain condition has many factors, so it’s vital to look at the bigger picture when it comes to treatment. Digging beyond the surface and the symptoms to find and unravel that root cause involves looking at all aspects of you, your medical history, lifestyle, environment, etc.
Maybe you’ve already identified with one or more of the examples described above and are starting to realise how big the picture is, or you already feel frustrated by treatments for chronic pain that only looked at one small area.
Helping You To Find The Answers
Healing is a journey. Working with us, you’ll learn a lot about yourself and how you can have more control over your health and well-being than you may realise. Our aim is to empower you.
People suffering from chronic pain often come to us feeling broken and hopeless. It can feel like nobody has truly listened or looked at them as a whole to see how all their symptoms fit together and are interconnected.
You’re not broken. You just haven’t found what you need to bring everything together again.
Life happens and can leave its mark. However, this doesn’t mean the after-effects have to be lived with forever. My approach looks at you as a whole person, including your diet,
lifestyle, environment, past medical history and events, taking everything into account and identifying the best treatment for your chronic pain. We’ll take the best course of action at the right time so you, your body and your mind are ready for it.
This is about working at the right pace for YOU so you get the best results.
What Happens During Your First Appointment
During your first appointment, we’ll have a very in-depth consultation. We’ll go through your full medical history, diet, lifestyle, and past and present events. This part of the process is thorough because every part of your life is relevant. We’ll cover absolutely everything to gain the full picture of your history to date and how it all relates in addition to how things are for you right now.
Some of it may seem irrelevant, but I ask that you bear with me and trust the process and my years of experience providing treatments for chronic pain. Everything is fully confidential and this is your safe space and opportunity to lay everything out so we can join the dots and find the triggers.
By listening to you and asking the right questions, you’ll feel properly heard, possibly for the first time, and we will be able to establish the best starting point for you and your body.
This can also mean lifestyle changes, so you’ll need to be prepared and committed to doing whatever it takes. Our years of experience combined with your full commitment have the capacity to create profound results if you are willing to put in some effort, too.
During each treatment, we will review how things have been and any changes in your health picture. We will then re-assess to find the best approach for the current session so everything we do is aligned with what your body/mind needs most at that time.
You are unique, the reasons your chronic pain is persisting are unique to you, and so each treatment will be tailored and relevant to what your body/mind needs to help create the change.
At every session, we’ll discuss the approach and what it involves. You will be an active part of the decisions that are made, and we’ll work together every step of the way.
A Revelation in Chronic Pain
My initial training was at the McTimoney Chiropractic College, as it was known then. In my final years of practice, I’d been giving my housemate some treatments for her chronic neck pain. We were three treatments in, and the pattern was always the same; she got worse for 24 hours and then it went right back to how it was.
But, we were taught it can take up to eight treatments for symptoms to improve. So, we discussed this and she was happy to continue with treatment.
During this time, she would come home every night complaining about her boss. Then one day she came home and announced she had quit her job! Wow..
The next day, she popped her head around the door where I was eating my breakfast to say her chronic neck pain had gone! And it stayed gone!
I felt inadequate at the time. When I reflected I thought, but there were misalignments, muscle tension, and signs of inflammation. I could feel real physical changes. But the problem wasn’t physical.
What I felt was just the body’s way of trying to force her to make a change. It was sending her a physical signal to correct the situation. Her pain in the neck boss! This was the start of a huge learning curve and I remained curious.
As I went on to practise as a Chiropractor, this became a recurring theme and I soon began to realise there were so many other things at play when it came to recurring or chronic pain.
Chronic pain rarely ever had a purely mechanical root cause. It wasn’t all just due to misalignment of the joints. There were always other factors, like diet, lifestyle, stress, trauma and emotions that needed to be addressed for someone to recover more quickly, more completely, and reduce any unnecessary reliance on treatments to ‘keep on top of everything’. I cover this in more detail on the ‘about us’ page.
Because of this revelation, I went on to train in Barral Institute Visceral Manipulation (it’s much more gentle than it sounds!) PSYCH-K® and Systematic Kinesiology. The beauty of all of these methods is that they ask your body what it needs rather than me deciding what I think is best. This way, you recover far more quickly.
For this reason, when we work together we’ll use muscle testing at the beginning of each session to find out which approach is the highest priority for your body. It knows what you need and in which order. The combination of your body’s inner wisdom, my 24 years of experience and the effort you put in between treatments will help find the solution you need for better health.
This Google Review from Jon Wilkins perfectly highlights what can be possible when we follow the bodies innate wisdom and guidance.
“Rachael is unbelievably brilliant.
Let me explain; I am a 63 year old, overweight man running my own busy business. Whilst also having to be full time carer for my disabled wife and for the last two years I have been suffering from osteoarthritis in my right knee. My doctors have been treating me with quarterly injections of cortisone and have recommended I have a knee replacement. There is a waiting list of about 12 months, but even if I have the operation, no one has considered how I would carry on with my caring duties during the weeks of recovery.
Then I met Rachael at a virtual business networking event where she said that she can help people improve their health naturally. I asked if she could help with the pain in my knees, as I was in an awful lot of pain with bone-on-bone grinding in the knee (There is no cartilage left). She said yes, she could help, so I booked in to see her.
She explained that she would use a mix of (PSYCH-K® and Kinesiology). I hadn’t heard of either of these so admit I was somewhat sceptical, but as the pain was getting overpowering, I agreed to it.
The first session was mainly PSYCH-K® and I left with five phrases I had to repeat to myself a few times each day. I admit I was feeling even more sceptical towards the end of the week but thought “in for a penny in for a pound” and returned for the first session of Kinesiology.
Wow, I have now had three sessions of Kinesiology, which I still do not understand, but it works! I no longer feel that excruciating grinding in my knees with every step. I can carry out my caring duties, I can walk the dog, go shopping, stand at the cooker cooking the meals all with virtually no pain. This, in turn, allows me to concentrate on my business better as I am not worrying about how I will cope with these tasks with painful knees. Also I haven’t needed to have any more cortisone injections or to see the doctor since I started seeing Rachael.
I strongly advise anyone who is suffering from osteoarthritis to make an appointment with Rachael as you will not be sorry.
Rachael is a lovely caring lady who is happy to explain what she is doing and why, even if how it works is still a mystery to me. As an added bonus I have lost ½ stone since seeing her.
Thank you so very much Rachael.” Jon Wilkins
A Combined Approach To Chronic Pain
I also work alongside my wife Lorna, who has additional skills, including CranioSacral Therapy and ScarWork. Her offering is explained in more detail on the Blended Approach page.
Because Lorna and I have a lot of cross-over skills, we can help you in a more complete way should you need it. We understand each other’s treatments extremely well and can communicate and work together to deliver what you need when you need it on a session-by-session basis. Sometimes this can mean working with one of us and then transferring to the other or it may be a joint approach throughout.
We always have your best interests at heart. If neither of us is the best thing for you, we will discuss that with you and help guide you in the right direction. We have decades of experience with many different types of treatment, so we will most likely have a good idea of what your next best step will be.
Our passion is to help you to get back to living the life you are hankering after right now. We remain curious and are constantly learning about health and how you can be helped in the best way.
We truly believe that there are always options. Improvements are possible; it is just a case of finding what’s right for you.
How Many Sessions Will I Need?
This is unfortunately impossible to answer because everybody is different. The journey that brought us to where we are is unique to us so until we begin to peel back the layers and see what comes up, it’s impossible to know what is required. My promise is that I’ll never keep you coming back for sessions you don’t need and I believe in delivering treatments for chronic pain that last and don’t require regular maintenance.
However, it’s important to note, that the real results come from how well you follow through with aftercare advice between sessions. This isn’t a magic fix, and results will come from dedication and input from you. You need to be willing to make changes if you want relief from pain.
Some may find benefits from the initial treatment, and for others, it can take time and this has no correlation with how long you have had a problem either.
Linking back to the examples described earlier, a situation where everything stems back to an emotion held in the body after a single traumatic event will take much less time than one that involves an accident, operation, dietary changes and the need for supplementation to boost your body’s resources.
I can promise that within my role, I will do my best at each session to deliver the most appropriate treatment for you at the right time. In addition, I ask that you commit to following through on any actions that are identified to help you get there in the shortest timeline.
It isn’t about having the fewest treatments but making sure that we are thorough, your true root cause is identified and addressed, and you have the newfound knowledge to help your health continue to improve beyond our sessions.
Ready to free yourself mentally and physically from the things keeping you stuck and in pain? Get in touch to book your first session or a free 30-minute chat, I look forward to working with you and seeing you flourish.
Treatment For Chronic Pain Pricing
Initial Consultation: (120 minutes) – £145
Follow-Up Sessions depending on which blend of treatments you need within the session. We’ll discuss this at the time of booking.
(90 minutes) – £110
(60 minutes) – £75
With Rachael Kennard-Wall