What to Expect

 Before Your First Visit

Considering coming in for a visit?

Welcome to Paragon Pain Solutions!

Before you book, I highly recommend that you call or email me first and schedule a free phone or Zoom consultation. You can also book a free Zoom consultation yourself online.

This way, we can clearly define your goals, and decide if Neurosomatic Therapy is the right path for you.

If all goes well, we can move on to the next phase and schedule your initial visit. You can either schedule this online yourself, or over the phone with me after your consultation.

Before coming in for your appointment, you are required to fill out the online intake form.

This usually takes about 10-20 minutes and provides me with a clear and detailed medical history so that I can provide the best and most personalized care for you.

Arriving for Your First Appointment

Please be sure to bring any relevant medical imaging (x-rays, MRIs, etc.) with you to your appointment, and try to arrive within 5 minutes of your scheduled time.

My office is located in Chestnut Hill, across the street from the Chestnut Hill West train station.

100 W Evergreen Ave Philadelphia, PA 19118.

Parking:
Feel free to park in the Septa lot across the street. They will not charge or ticket you. There is street parking on Evergreen Ave after crossing Shawnee, although this fills up quickly. There is also metered street parking on Evergreen between Germantown and Shawnee, and on Shawnee between Highland and Evergreen. 

Entering the Office:
The entrance to the office is the small vestibule with windows on Evergreen Ave at the corner of Evergreen and Shawnee. Doors will be unlocked, so please just go ahead and enter when you arrive. Please do not ring any doorbells. If you see doorbells then you are at the wrong entrance!

Call the office if you have any trouble. I may or may not be at the front desk when you arrive. If not, then please have a seat, and I will be with you shortly.

What Does A Treatment Session Look Like?

The first thing we will do during your initial session is to recap and prioritize the goals for treatment that we discussed over the phone. If you did not have a phone consultation with me first, then this is the time for us to talk briefly and define your goals, discuss your treatment history, and address any questions or concerns that you might have. After this, we dive right into the assessment and treatment process.

What to Wear

For assessment and treatment, women are encouraged to wear or bring leggings or athletic shorts and a tank top or sports bra. If you don’t, then no worries! You will be provided a gown that consists of a pair of shorts, and a top with Velcro closure in the back.

Men are encouraged to wear or bring basketball or running shorts. If you don’t have your own, a pair will be provided for you.

The Postural Assessment

Once you are ready, we will go through the complete assessment process. This usually takes about 10-15 minutes.

Basically this just involves me locating various bony landmarks on your body and noting their relative positions to one another. I record my findings (on a chart just like the one pictured to the left) as we go. 

When we are finished, I have a complete picture of how your body adapts to the standing, sitting, and supine (lying down) positions.

During this process, you are encouraged to offer your feedback has to how you feel – whether you feel imbalanced, twisted, tilted, tight, loose, in pain, or nothing at all.

Remember that the clinic is a safe space where you should always feel free to communicate and explore what you are feeling in your body.

This enhances the therapeutic process, makes my job easier, and gets you better results!

What Am I Checking For?

Among the many things I look for, some of the most important are any distortions in the positions of the bones of your hips, shoulders, neck, and cranium.

FYI, checking the positions of your cranial bones requires me to stick my fingers in your ears, so don’t be alarmed! This is an important measurement that can tell me how well your body is righting itself, among other things.

I also look for differences in leg length, hip bone size, and any significant changes between standing and supine positions, as this can indicate that your internal organs may need to be treated (yes, I do organ massage, too!).

Muscle Testing

After assessing your posture, I then start the process of assessing your movement patterns with Neurokinetic TherapyⓇ manual muscle testing. This involves the application of light pressure as you resist in various ways.

The postural assessment gives me hints as to where to start testing and what might be wrong. The muscle testing allows me to confirm or correct my suspicions from the postural assessment.

Muscle testing and retesting happens constantly throughout the treatment process. You’ll find that my style usually involves two parts that always go hand in hand – muscle testing, and muscle releasing.

Testing is intended to identify the proper muscles to work on.

After we test, we can then release the overworking muscles, and retest to confirm that the pattern has changed.

Once muscles that once tested weak then test strong, and your pain level has significantly improved, we know that we’re on the right track!

These patterns don’t stay gone though, they will come back unless you replace them with more functional patterns.

This is why at the end of the session, I will give you a short list of one or two of the most important patterns we’ve found to work on yourself at home.

Treatment

Once we’ve identified which tissues are tight and overworking, I use a variety of massage and bodywork techniques designed to gently release these tissues, reset your nervous system, and bring balance to the structures of your body.

The amazing thing about the assessment process is that it really allows me to pinpoint the most restricted and dysfunctional areas without having to guess.

Once I identify these areas, I like to begin treatment slowly – by carefully working my way through the various layers of tissue until I meet resistance.

Usually it is the deeper tissues in the areas that have the most physical forces placed upon them that are the most painful or tender to the touch.

When we get to these areas, don’t panic!

Although your instinct may be to tense up and protect these areas, it is important for you to try to relax by focusing on your breath. The key here is to let your exhale be twice as long as your inhale, as this puts your body into a state of relaxation by activating your parasympathetic nervous system.

As you do this, I use gentle compressions and gliding strokes to help release the tissue.

The sensory nerves in these areas are usually hypersensitive, so it may feel as if I am applying a lot of pressure even though I am not!

My goal here is not to smash your muscles into submission, but to gently provide enough feedback for your nervous system to reset the resting tension. As this happens, you should notice the discomfort begin to subside.

Of course this is all done with regard to your specific issues. For example, if you come in with pain in your right shoulder and I see that your shoulder measurements are off, I may treat the muscles in and around both shoulders to relieve tension and restore them to a more optimal position.

That said, I may also treat the hips, head or neck in this scenario if I found reason to. The position of one structure in the body can have a significant impact on the position of the others.

Communication is Key

I can’t stress enough that you are highly encouraged to provide feedback during this process!

What hurts? What kind of pain is it? How intense is it? Is it subsiding? Does it feel good? Does it bring up certain emotions? Images? Memories?

All in all, it is important to focus primarily on what you are feeling in your body during treatment. Consider this your #1 job as a patient.

In fact, starting a journal to document your experience with therapy and what you feel in your body on a daily basis is an excellent supplementary activity!

You can’t heal what you can’t feel, and the better you get at feeling and detecting the subtleties of your amazing body, the better you will get at healing yourself.

After Your First Visit

It is common to feel a significant change after the first treatment. Although it commonly takes 4-6 treatments to begin to see a significant improvement in your symptoms, many patients report feeling much looser, more balanced, and more clear-headed after their very first visit.

You may encounter some soreness over the next 24-48 hours as well. The higher your overall levels of stress and muscle tension, the more likely you are to experience this. This is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (or DOMS), and is exactly what happens to you when you have a hard workout after some time off.

Applying ice or heat is not necessary; but if you choose to, alternating the two provides the most benefit by creating a “pumping” effect that contracts and expands the tissues – thereby helping to clear out waste products and bring in nutrients. This sharp contrast in sensation also helps “reset” the nervous system’s connection to this area.

Experimenting carefully with movement is always encouraged. I will always give you things to work on at home. 

I’m Here for You

Please feel free to contact me anytime if you have any questions or concerns about treatment, homework, or what you are experiencing in your body.

I am here to guide you on your healing journey.