Services
Stuart McDade Biokineticists offer the following services:
Wellness and Lifestyle Management
Orthopaedic Rehabilitation
Orthopaedics is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention and correction of injuries or disorders of the skeletal system and associated muscles, joints, and ligaments. Injuries commonly (not exclusively) seen and rehabilitated at the practice include:
- Hip and knee replacements
- Chronic lower back pain
- Upper back and neck rehabilitation
- Rehabilitation of ACL and PCL injuries
- Iliotibial Band Syndrome (ITB)
- Ankle sprains
- Various shoulder injuries including SLAP lesions, rotator cuff injuries and impingements
- Patellofemoral pain in knee (common in runners)
Chronic Disease Management
A chronic disease is one that persists for a long time, usually lasting 3 months or more. Chronic diseases generally cannot be prevented by vaccines or cured by medication, nor do they just disappear.
Health damaging behaviors – particularly tobacco use, lack of physical activity, and poor eating habits – are major contributors to the leading chronic diseases. Various chronic diseases commonly requiring biokinetics intervention at the practice include:
- Arthritis (Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid arthritis)
- Cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, strokes, arrhythmia etc.)
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Cancer
- Osteoporosis
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
Wellness and Lifestyle Management
Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life. Exercise is a vitally important part in an individual achieving wellness. At the practice we aim to assist in achieving your wellness goals with personalized focused training programs, targeted at improving on weaknesses and maintaining or improving on strengths. This is achieved through an assessment of health risk factors and subsequent implementation of intervention strategies to support the individual towards total wellness. This most often involves the prescription of a program aimed at weight loss, cardiovascular fitness, muscle strengthening, increased flexibility and mental toughness.
Neurological Conditions
Neurological impairments are a group of disorders that primarily relate to some form of damage in the central nervous system comprised of the brain and spinal cord. There is an extensive list of conditions which fall under this category and most of them can, in some way, be improved with supervised biokinetic intervention. Some of these conditions commonly seen at the practice include:
- Cerebral palsy
- Parkinson’s Disease
- Traumatic or acquired brain injury (motor vehicle accident / stroke etc)
- Multiple sclerosis
- Aphasia
- Brachial plexus injuries
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Myopathy
Children’s Biokinetics
Child Biokinetics is a branch of Biokinetics that focuses on the neuromotor and developmental side of movement in children. Many postural and motor control problems tend to manifest themselves at a young age and can become increasingly difficult to rectify the older one gets.
Once adolescents have matured skeletally (around the age of 16), their skeletal posture is mostly set for life. By supervising the correct movement techniques from a young age, many postural problems can be managed more efficiently during childhood and this results in less problems and less risk of injury as the child gets older.
Elite Sports Conditioning
Elite sports refers to those individuals who participate at a high level of competitive sport either at senior club, provincial or international level. At Stuart McDade Biokineticists, we have been fortunate to work with some of South Africa’s best sportsmen and women across numerous sporting codes, including Paralympic medalists and Olympic athletes. Some of the services required for these specific athletes compared to the general population include:
- Sports injury management
- Gait analysis
- Sports programming
- Sport specific assessments (speed, agility, power, strength, endurance, flexibility, reaction times etc.)
- Isokinetic muscle testing
- Movement functionality and economy of movement
- Training efficiency
- Strapping of overloaded and unstable areas in the body
- Education on training techniques
Isokinetic Rehabilitation
With isokinetic muscle contractions, the muscle speed remains constant throughout the movement. As a muscle’s force changes via the length-tension relationship during a contraction, an isotonic contraction will keep force constant while velocity changes, but an isokinetic contraction will keep velocity constant while force changes. Essentially, this can often be a safer and more beneficial means of testing and rehabilitation, particularly for individuals recovering from acute injury. The equipment required for this kind of training and rehabilitation (known as a cybex or biodex) is not always readily available in South Africa for various reasons, particularly the high cost involved, but at Stuart McDade Biokineticists it is a daily function of the practice and has produced significantly better results in patients, particularly with orthopaedic conditions.
Home Visits
Certain individuals prefer to receive treatment at their homes as opposed to the Wellness Centre premises. Most often this is either due to the convenience of having their own equipment and facilities at their homes that they prefer to use or because the patient is unable to move from their home due to health reasons, often the case with elderly patients. At Stuart McDade Biokineticists, we aim to provide you with a quality service where it suits you best and therefore we offer a call out service for people who require or prefer to receive treatment at their homes.
