Integration Over Isolation: A Systematic Approach to Health

At Functional Patterns Dublin, we don’t just address the symptoms, but the whole system of the body in order to understand the root of your issues. In this short video Tom discusses integration vs isolation as it relates to training and rehabilitation, and what a systems vs symptoms approach looks like.

Symptom vs Systems Approach

It is very common today for people to present to healthcare professionals with multiple symptoms or issues all at once. This is something we see in our practice every day, and in the past while practicing as a physiotherapist something that would have always presented a problem.

Which issue should I attack first? This was always the first thing that came to mind and something I always battled with. Generally, we are taught to prioritise the worst issue that day by doing some hands on treatment followed by some isolated exercises on the area in question. However, I never truly understood how all of these issues were related and only over felt I was helping to manage symptoms relating a more global problem.

Integration over Isolation

When I started using Functional Patterns I was finally able to view the body as an integrated system, and being able to analyse someone’s movement patterns more deeply allowed me to understand how all of these issues are related. In order see the body as one system we must be able to investigate the most fundamental pattern it has to execute, walking.

With this information we can then start to address all the symptoms associated with poor movement at once. We can integrate multiple areas of the body and build strength, flexibility, and stability all at once. Doing this we have found great success with clients reporting improvements in multiple issues all at once. All this without us having to pay direct attention to some of the issues at hand.