Daniel Bueno Martínez, CEO of Delta Terapias Clinic, explains Functional Percutaneous Neuromodulation. A therapy they apply to a multitude of professional athletes and runners, such as marathoner Javier Guerra.
The techniques used during treatments are varied. But all are based on a single concept, called Functional Neuromodulation.
Neuromodulation is a concept that signifies the nervous system’s ability to regulate its activities in response to internal or external stimuli. Functional, because they seek to influence body function to improve it.
HOW IS THE TREATMENT DONE?
Based on a prior study/assessment I perform on the patient, listening to their sensations, performing muscle tests and feeling their movement, I extract qualitative information that helps me understand what may not be functioning in their body system, what faults exist in their motor nervous system (the nervous system is the great boss: boss of the muscles and boss of pain) and how they are compensating for those faults. From that compensation pain when running usually arises. Understanding the nervous system from a physiological, structural and environmental perspective, we can neuromodulate it.
We frequently use needles as the thread of treatment. Needles are, by their nature, a stimulus that cannot go unnoticed by the body. They traverse the skin and that creates, in itself, a torrent of reactions, excitatory or suppressive, in the nervous system. Thus, we can remove their compensations or muscular adaptations that produced pain when running, returning to ‘field players expelled back onto the field’ (the muscles that were not functioning), and thus, each muscle will only have to perform its job and not do the job of those that were not working. The work is distributed, and this is ideal, because the amount of load that can be absorbed is greater, which translates into being able to run more, causing less damage.
This process will allow us to shorten recovery times when returning to exercise with less or no pain, and it will also enable us to improve performance, bringing the patient closer to an improvement in their ability to perform an activity, such as running. This specialty could be the future in elite and non-elite sport. Many athletes worldwide, in Canada, the USA, and increasingly in Europe, are already using it. Track and field, soccer, ice hockey, golf…
The creator of the concept was Dr. Alejandro Elorriaga, Spanish and currently residing in Canada. He realized that when he performed his treatments, his athletes posted the best times of the season.
Now, that performance boost, if it is not followed by proper strength work, ends. Therefore, it is essential to sustain the improvement with proper strengthening.
This type of treatments does not solve everything at once, as almost none do, and one must be reasonably patient for the body to reset and reactivate what was deactivated.
