2will physiotherapy & pain management clinic. North Shore, Auckland

x → ←

Chronic Pain Management

We can help you recover from chronic pain conditions, such as these:

– persistent back and neck pain
– headache, facial and jaw pain
– arthritis
– fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue
– complex injuries
– overuse conditions
– complex regional pain syndrome
– post-operation pain

These conditions are often challenging because they are very “grey” – lacking an outright treatment or endpoint of the condition. Thus we have certain principles around which we have built our rehabilitation methods:

1. Clinical Efficacy – evidence-based and driven by thorough clinical reasoning in everything that we do
2. Consistency – aiming for gradual change in physiological, behavioural and psychological facets of the condition
3. Affordability – our own Clinical Exercise Studio allows huge flexibility in cost
4. Holistic Care – we help you to resolve psychological, social as well as medical aspect of your condition

We’ll be your coach, companion, and clinician, the backbone of your rehabilitation (sorry for the pun).

Please have a look at our clinical model of pain management which describes our approach in more detail: click here, or contact us.

“I came to 2will physiotherapy with an injury that went back 15 years. I found the concise and professional way Francis treated my injury to be excellent and supportive…I have yet to experience a friendlier, professional and more motivated team.”

– Nathan Gilchrist

x → ←

Back Pain

Back pain. Especially ones that don’t go away. There really is no one solution that works for everyone.

Consider these different scenarios:

You have a disc bulge
You have a disc bulge that is big enough to compress a nerve
You have a disc bulge that is prolapsed that is quite recent
You have a disc bulge that is prolapsed that is quite old
You have a disc bulge as well as facet compression and the disc bulge is not actually contributing to your symptoms
You have a disc bulge as well as facet compression and very weak abdominal muscles
You have a disc bulge as well as facet compression and very weak back muscles
You have a disc bulge as well as facet compression and nerve compression from your buttock muscles
You have facet hypomobility leading to concentration of load on certain bony areas
You have locking of certain joints
You have weak back muscles (or abdominal muscles) and chronic sensitisation of the sciatic nerve
You have disc bulge + facet + joint locking + muscle weakness + sensitisation of the sciatic nerve
You had a disc surgery
You had a fusion

I mean you can have any number of combinations when it comes to back pain, and in every scenario, in every person, the management is different. We may focus on hands-on therapy, exercises (and there are tons of different types of exercises), behavioural management, or any combination of these in any order.

It’s often challenging for clinicians and patients alike, but THEY ALL CAN GET BETTER, no matter how complicated or chronic.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (email if you have a bigger query) and tell us about your conditions to take the first step towards your recovery.

x → ←

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) can be described as “confusion” of your somatosensory nervous system. A bit like someone that you know who might have taken what you have said out of context, took it in a completely wrong way, and blamed you for all his/her misfortunes, your nervous system has decided to react to something in a rather inappropriate manner and is throwing a massive tantrum.

(This actually occurs to a degree in most chronic pain conditions, but more obvious in CRPS)

When you have CRPS you might not only have excruciating pain constantly, you may have persistent swelling, change in skin colour or appearance, loss of coordination of the limb and inexplicable inflammation-like symptoms.

No one really knows why this confusion of nervous system occurs (although there are many opinions and theories) but it is not necessary to know WHY to treat this.

In short, our management of CRPS is focused on CONSISTENT EDUCATION OF CORRECT BEHAVIOUR OF YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM. This education must occur in your ALL FOLLOWING ASPECTS: physical aspect (exercises), psychological aspect (education and integration), and behavioural aspect (effort from the patients to modify their way of thoughts and behaviours to create environment that is conducive to their recovery).

It will take compelling effort often for an extended period of time (months to years) from all parties involved to achieve recovery, but we believe that this always can be done with consistency, clinically accurate management, and right environment.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (email if you have a bigger query) and tell us about your conditions to take the first step towards your recovery.

x → ←

Neck pain

Neck pain can vary from something like “yeah it’s just been a bit tight over the last twenty years” to “Arggh! I can’t move and I can’t function!” with pain down the arms.

A bit like back pain, treatment of neck pain depends on the scenario of each condition. But neck pain can be somewhat categorised into two groups:

1. acute – recent onset, relatively sudden
2. chronic – anything from few months to yeeeeeaaars

Acute usually is fairly easy to recover from and we won’t go into it here. Chronic is a different beast.

Neck condition has a very close relationship with non-physical factors, such as:
– stress
– attitude
– life experience
– work
– family situation
– beliefs about your health condition

What we mean by “close relationship” is that neck pain often (but not always) is a physical manifestation of emotional conflicts. Identifying and working on these aspect of your condition is just as crucial as physical therapy. We’ll help you with these as well.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (email if you have a bigger query) and tell us about your conditions to take the first step towards your recovery.

x → ←

Our Mission

Here’s what we’ve set out to do:

To provide the most effective and efficient care that is as much evidence-based as possible for all patients.

To provide and coordinate effective and accessible long-term chronic pain management for Primary Health Care.

To educate other health professionals and the students, of effective physiotherapy and chronic pain management.

Our general guidelines:

– 40min consultation duration. Each clinician here sees the maximum of 10 patients per day in standard working hours.

– Maximum of four clients at our Pilates studio at one time.

– The most thorough, accurate approach backed up by up-to-date clinical knowledge and thorough hands-on techniques.

– We don’t like to muck about – if you don’t meet our goals you’ll be referred straightaway for further investigations or opinions.

– We adapt our services to what each patient needs, desire and can afford.

– We never overservice.

2will is physiotherapy and chronic pain management at its best. For everyone.

“The clinical services that I have received and continue to receive from 2will physiotherapy are outstanding. Not only are they very skilled practitioners but their personal warmth, caring and integrity comes through in all that they do. Patients are listened to and receive personalised and monitored ongoing care as and when required.

I cannot recommend this practise highly enough.”

– Nerida Cath

x → ←

Referrers' page

Us at 2will physiotherapy and pain management clinic have a mission:

To provide and coordinate effective and accessible long-term chronic pain management for Primary Health Care sector.

We achieve effective and accessible provision of the pain management services by:

being evidence-driven, with constant integration of the past and current literature on pain into our treatment system
giving thorough continuing education of the condition to the patients
providing a place where they can consistently turn up, exercise safely, be motivated and be guided

We coordinate effective and accessible provision of the pain management services by:

a clear differential diagnosis process
having a clinical knowledge on current approach in pain intervention by NSAIDs/analgesia/adjuvants which allows us to have clear expectations and fallback plans
prompt referrals and communications to other health professionals when needed

Type of patient who will benefit the most from our services are:

persistent or chronic pain of musculoskeletal / neuropathic / functional or non-specific in nature
those who have just been discharged from the DHB Pain Team
those who don’t meet urgent criteria for DHB Pain Team and is on the waiting list
elderlies who need to work on general fitness or conditioning (often post surgery/illness or due to pain issues)
post surgical pain

We have often found that these people “give up on themselves” due to lack of provision of pain services that Primary or Private Health Care has in place. Health professionals end up saying something along the line of “there’s not a lot we can do and you have to learn to live with it”.

Often all they need is a place where they can consistently turn up, exercise safely, be motivated and be guided.

2will physiotherapy & pain management services is where they can do that, so they will “learn to live with it”.

x → ←

Meaning of "2will"

We get this asked a LOT. After all “2will” is a slightly unusual name for a physiotherapy and pain management clinic.

We came up with the name because we believe that in order for someone to improve their health, especially those with chronic pain, we need two people “willing” to combine their efforts:

1. a willing patient who will do anything to learn and improve their lives

2. a willing therapist who will do anything to learn and help the patient

Thus the name “2will” was born.

If you want more detail, this is what we set out to do everyday.

x → ←

Gym-based rehabilitation & programme setups

Gym-based rehabilitation has been the traditional methodology when it comes to exercise therapy, and while we love our Pilates our expertise extends to gym-based exercises (in fact that’s where it all began for us too).

2will physiotherapy can setup a programme that’s appropriate for your condition or review your existing one at one of our associate gyms at no more cost to you than our standard charges. We utilise gym the most when it comes to those who are at return-to-work rehabilitation or post-surgery rehabilitation. Combined with our Pilates system and hands-on therapy, our approach on gym rehabilitation is hugely effective.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or an professional athlete needing advanced exercises, we can help you.

x → ←

Fibromyalgia

I use the word “Fibromyalgia” very carefully because it more or less describes the symptom rather than the actual reason for the pain.

If you were told that you have fibromyalgia (or something vaguely like that), it’s likely that you
1) have pain in a number of locations on/in your body
2) have had it for a while
3) have had X-ray/MRI/ other scans & tests and been told that there is “nothing they can find”

Well, the scans and tests won’t show anything because a body is perfectly capable of creating pain without anything that can be seen by such scans and tests.

In order to understand fibromyalgia you have to understand a process called sensitisation. It is a process where the nerves responsible for pain in our body undergoes a change where it sends pain signals even when they are not supposed to. A good example is when you have flu. If you can think back to the last time when you were a bit sick it’s very likely that you body felt quite tender to touch. If you have had an old injury or pain you might have even felt that again.

Of course the reason that you were feeling such pain when you had been sick was NOT because you had something wrong or old injury got “re-injured”, but your nerves became “sensitised” to pain – it’s not an abstract concept but physiological, actually perfectly normal, behaviour of the nerves.

However it does become abnormal if this continues to persist. And in order for you to make a recovery from fibromyalgia it is absolutely crucial that WE FIND THE REASON behind this persistence of sensitisation to pain. Following are some of the reasons:

1) mis-management at the early stage of the symptoms
2) lack of muscular fitness of the body, resuting in excessive physical load on nerves (most often in very flexible people)
3) chronic emotional stress that have activated “fight-or-flight” for a period of time
4) sudden one-off emotional stress that have activated “fight-or-flight” response
5) chronic physical stress (high-level athletes)
6) poor body awareness that have loaded the body for an extended period of time (essentially bad habits)
7) unhelpful, undermining belief in regards to body and pain (e.g. fear avoidance)
8) genetic disposition to the condition (quite common actually)
9) hormonal (fair bit of debate on this but certainly very possible)

And the list goes on and on.

Our role is to be the coach, companion and clinician to guide and treat you as we discover the core issue that is causing your fibromyalgia, and help you to “correct the ship”.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (email if you have a bigger query) and tell us about your conditions to take the first step towards your recovery.

x → ←

Francis the director

Hi there my name is Francis Joung and I am the director of 2will physiotherapy & pilates studio. I am a certified Clinical Pilates instructor, Dry Needling practitioner, as well as having trained in Mckenzie therapy and manipulations. I also keep myself busy nowadays by working on our own long-term Chronic Pain Management programme

I am a member of NZ Society of Physiotherapists, Sports Physiotherapy NZ, and NZ Pain Society (for Chronic Pain). They help me to keep my standard of practice to its best by providing me and motivating me with continual education.

I also play a lot of music – I was studying Bachelor of Music in Melbourne University for a while before I had to give it up due to the birth of my first daughter. Currently I play flamenco guitar for dancers and singers whenever I can get away from work and the kids (as much as I love them to bits). I combine my musical expertise with physiotherapy knowledge to offer the most effective treatment for musicians’ injuries, and lecture intermittently at Auckland University School of Music for Injury Prevention and provide services for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

I have a personal sporting background in rugby, weightlifting and mountainbiking. But these days I’m pretty content with just keeping myself fit (I’m quite petrified of mid-life mid-section gains).

I am very proud of my clinic and the team. Our whole business is based on personalisation of management so long-term solutions can be found especially for difficult or chronic conditions. It really has to be experienced to see how good and thorough we are so please pop us an email or give us a ring!

x → ←

Testimonials

Here is one.

“I highly recommend the 2will physiotherapy Chronic Pain Workshop approach to eliminating long-term pain. This programme, with the guidance of Francis Joung, helped me to finally be pain free after 3 years. During this time, I routinely woke in pain in the dead of night, several times weekly, with corresponding negative effects on both my personal and professional life. Now, I have been pain free for more than a month, and my quality of life is significantly improved. I am very glad that Francis realised what might be causing my pain and helped me work my way through it to a solution.”

Margaret Coe

Please click here for more testimonials

x → ←

Joshua - the senior physiotherapist

Joshua Kim is specialised in musculoskeletal physiotherapy with Masters degree in Health Science, with Postgrad Diploma in manipulation recognised by IFOMPT (International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists). He is also trained in biomechanical assessment, exercise prescription, falls prevention, Mulligan concept, pre/post-op rehabilitation and currently in training for Clinical Pilates.

His manual therapy (hands-on) skills and ability to “pick the right spot” is quite legendary amongst our patients, thus he is rightly appreciated by those who need thorough hands-on care.

Joshua also has a passion for teaching physiotherapy and he begins his journey of teaching in Korea in 2013, invited to be a guest lecturer for a number of universities (while Francis picks up the pieces here).

When he is not being a physio he keeps his hands full keeping up with his wife and his young son Jonathan, as well as contributing greatly to his church.

x → ←

2will & Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

2will physiotherapy & pilates studio is the pioneer in musicians’ healthcare and we are proud to be the official provider for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is one of NZ’s leading art organisations that reaches deeply into the community to promote beauty of music and we are very proud to be supporting them.

One of the ways you can too is by simply going to their concerts! Their music has to be heard live to be appreciated (as with all classical musics).

You can go to their website by clicking here: apo.co.nz

x → ←

Michelle our physiotherapist

Michelle is the youngest staff at 2will and maybe this explains why she is so bouncy and full of energy. She went through the physiotherapy education system at Auckland University of Technology and owns fantastic hand-on therapy skills to ensure the outcome that we demand at 2will physiotherapy.

Her passion in physiotherapy is effective chronic pain management not only in clinical treatment but also in holistic / lifestyle perspective. She firmly believes that in order to help patients recover from chronic conditions the physiotherapist need to be someone who takes a wholehearted interest in patients’ lives, to find what kind of relationship their conditions have with their lives and patterns, and to assume the position of a guide to point them to the right direction.

She often goes to bed at nights wondering how she can make more difference in her patients’ lives (really she does).

Michelle does have a life outside work though, probably much more so than Francis and Josh combined. She loves books, movies and going out with her friends. She also believes in and treasures her family, especially her little niece.

x → ←