Conditions

Most people arrive knowing where it hurts and very little else, which is a perfectly good place to begin. The thirteen above are arranged by the part of the body they affect, so you can go straight to whichever one sounds like yours.

If two of them sound like you, mention it when you book rather than trying to decide between them. Working out which one came first is our job.

Trouble here travels. A lower back that has quietly stiffened changes how you stand, and that turns up weeks later as a neck that will not turn far enough to reverse off the drive. People often describe what they believe are two separate complaints and leave with one explanation.

Scoliosis sits in this group but behaves unlike the rest of it. The word describes a sideways curve rather than an injury, so the work is about keeping you comfortable and moving freely — not about straightening anything out.

The arm suffers repetition far more than impact. A job containing the same lift a hundred times a day, a winter of overhead decorating, a laptop sitting slightly too low. None of it hurts on the day. It surfaces later during something entirely trivial, like reaching behind the passenger seat.

Two of these carry sporting names that mislead more than they help. A good share of the people we see with them have never held a racket, and the label says nothing useful about how the problem began or what settles it.

Everything down here carries your weight, so it tends to announce itself as a change in how you move before it announces itself as pain. Taking the stairs one at a time. A stride that has shortened without you ever deciding it should. Getting out of a chair in two goes instead of one.

These joints work as a chain, which is why the sore part and the responsible part are so often not the same part. A knee that complains halfway round a run can trace back to how little the hip above it rotates.

These turn up in two forms. One has a moment attached to it — a tackle, an awkward landing, a sprint on a cold morning. The other has no moment at all and accumulated across a training block, which makes it easy to push through and easy to underestimate.

The tendon problems at the heel and the kneecap belong firmly to the second kind. They generally want loading that is managed rather than rest that is total, and they take longer to settle than anybody wants to be told.