Integrative Manual Therapy™ is a powerful technology that yields profound results in returning the human body to optimal health. With nearly three decades of successful outcomes, this unique science brings deep, long-lasting results to the challenges of illness and rehabilitation and true preventative healthcare. Integrative Manual Therapy™ is the future of health-care brought to our patients today.
When one thinks of advances in medical technology, the first images that leap to mind are often of cold, expensive machines or billion-dollar research under the microscope. While such models certainly have their place, they can often be enhanced or even obviated by Integrative Manual Therapy™. This totally non-invasive, medication-free modality uses the most basic of tools -- human hands -- to support the body's innate wisdom to heal itself.
Integrative therapy works the whole "you", not isolated body parts. We do this because your body and mind function as an integrated whole, with every component affecting every other component.
Integrative Manual Therapy™ has been in development over the past 30 years by Sharon (Weiselfish) Giammatteo, Ph.D. P.T. She formally introduced this work in her first lecture on Structural and Functional Rehabilitation in 1981. It has remained the focus of clinical practice and continuing research at Regional Physical Therapy in Bloomfield, CT (today, Center IMT Bloomfield, CT) since its inception. Dr. (Weiselfish) Giammatteo’s 1992 doctoral work incorporated advanced Integrative Manual Therapy™ in the field of rehabilitation for the neurologic client.
It should actually come as no surprise that one of the most advanced technologies for achieving optimal health is truly at our “finger tips”. The human body itself is an amazing technology infinitely more advanced than the computer, television, cell phone and other pinnacles of modern science put together.
The human body, while being amazingly complex when compared to other feats of technology such as a computer, has its quirks. It is resilient and self sufficient without our constant attention. It doesn’t work any harder than it absolutely has to. If you need only 72 beats of your heart per minute to keep going, your body won’t throw in an extra 10 beats for good measure. That would be a waste of valuable energy. However, when illness strikes the body has to work harder to compensate. The ability to self heal is an amazing circumstance each and every time it occurs. There are times it occurs of which we are totally unaware. Still other times, the healing process requires so much effort that many other functions are shut down while homeostasis is restored. An example of this is when you have the flu.
Most health problems –- whether minor or chronic -– simply come down to blockages and other dysfunctions, which prevent various aspects of the body from self-healing. These might be traits that we are born with, or caused by an accident. Also, the body's immune and filtering systems can get so overloaded by an environmentally challenged world that they can no longer process the build-up of toxins.
The fundamental premise of Integrative Manual Therapy™ is to locate the cause of dysfunction and reopen the body's natural lines of communication. Once this inherent flow is reestablished, the body's innate healing abilities also return to optimum levels. This non-invasive philosophy of Integrative Manual Therapy™ is a true embodiment doing something “with” the body instead of “to” the body.
Once a treatment plan has been designed, one or more Integrative Manual Therapy™ practitioners begin implementing it. The length and exact nature of the treatment will depend on the unique results of Integrative Diagnostics™ for each client. Patients also play an important role in the effectiveness of their healing process, including their willingness to do assigned "homework" on themselves and lifestyle changes.
While Integrative Manual Therapy™ is a hands-on technique; it is distinctly different from other modalities such as massage or traditional physical therapy. Patients remain fully clothed. Gentle pressures, extensions and rotations are systematically applied to release blockages and other dysfunction. The treatment process is as powerful, yet subtle and non-aggressive as the diagnostics process. Equally important, Integrative Manual Therapy™ encourages the body to continue to work on itself even after a treatment.
Integrative Manual Therapy™ encompasses, to date, approximately 20,000 individual yet interrelated techniques that encourage the body to heal itself in various ways and levels. Those individual techniques are organized into systems designed to return specific body components to optimal health. Various systems, in turn, are incorporated into one or more protocols that become part of a client's treatment plan. In practice, these protocols may appear to have little or nothing to do with the obvious problem the body is presenting. Yet this systems approach is key to attaining and maintaining optimal health.
An illness often manifests from a series of events that cause dysfunction on multiple levels. One such dysfunction may mask another until cleared in the course of Integrative Manual Therapy™ treatment. During therapy sessions, practitioners continually revisit the Integrative Diagnostics™ process in order to assess and treat newly revealed layers of dysfunction. These can be likened to the layers of an onion. Utilizing these interrelated techniques, practitioners are able to address the multiple issues that often affect a client's health.
