Recreational golfer James Lim had tried many different forms of therapy over a six-month period to fix his frozen shoulder. Then he gave myotherapy a go, and was soon back in the swing of things.
'We set a treatment plan and it took a little time to gain full function, but I was playing golf within a month,' says Lim, a property consultant in his mid-50s.
The term 'myotherapy' references myo - Latin for 'muscle' - and 'fascia', which are thin, fibrous sheets of connective tissue that cover muscles. It's a form of physical therapy used to treat or prevent soft tissue pain and restricted joint movement caused by muscle fascia dysfunction.
Relatively well-established in the US and Australia, it falls under the umbrella of massage therapy, which is considered complementary and alternative medicine. Although relatively unknown in Hong Kong compared to popular treatments such as physiotherapy and osteopathy, awareness of myotherapy is growing.
When Liam Fitzpatrick, a physiotherapist and myotherapist trained at Australia's Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, moved to Hong Kong in 2004, he was consulting about 20 to 25 patients a week - 15 for golf training and about five to 10 for myotherapy. These days, about 90 per cent of the some 30 patients he sees a week are specifically for treatment, he says.
Fitzpatrick, director of MyoActive Back and Sport Injury Clinic in Central, believes many professionals are high-functioning type-A personalities who ask a lot of their bodies and therefore suffer overuse injuries and poor musculoskeletal habits. 'Myotherapy addresses this lifestyle exceptionally well, through its clinical assessment and focus on soft-tissue retraining,' he says.
Myotherapy stems from trigger point therapy, pioneered in the early 1940s by the late Dr Janet Travell, who used the technique to treat late president John F. Kennedy's bad back.
