What’s the best frequency for Bowen Therapy appointments ?

Clients often ask what frequency should they have Bowen Therapy.

The short, simple answer is about weekly until the problem is resolved. 

Here’s why:

Bowen Therapy give the body triggers to begin a healing process. Bowen moves influence the body’s central nervous system to bring the body into balance. Other muscles and structures that were impacted or compensating then need to adjust themselves and get used to being in their improved state.

And that healing process is not instantaneous – it usually takes a few days ! Many people don’t feel those adjustments or sensations in the body, but rest assured that they are still happening. While others feel aches or odd sensations in different parts of their body, often not where their original site of pain was.

Because your body needs time to adjust after treatment, returning for more treatment after only a few days isn’t going to help you feel better faster.

The body usually needs a 2-5 days to work through that adjustment process. After that, next layers of restrictions start to become visible and/or strong compensatory patterns begin to reemerge. Some people start to feel aches begin to return – a sign that we’ve made progress but there’s still more to be done.

(My caveat is if you’ve done something to re-injure yourself, then that’s a different story – come back in sooner !)

Leaving a couple of weeks between appointments, particularly when starting to address a chronic problem, isn’t going to help treatment either.

Those strong compensatory patterns need to be addressed before they’ve completely returned, and the body is back to where it originally was.  With too long a gap between appointments, there’s a real risk that you’re back to where we started.

About a week between appointments is the sweet spot for treatment.

On this timing, the body has had time to work through the changes initiated in one appointment, but hasn’t had too much time to go back to square one.

I see progression in treatment a little like a dance – two steps forward, one step back – with those steps becoming smaller with time, as the body reaches and holds a pain-free place.

Once those backward steps become quite small and the body is holding that good pattern each week, then it’s time to extend the time. For a chronic problem, this could take 4-6 weeks (and sometimes longer).

We’ll then extend time between appointments to 2 weeks, then 3 or 4 weeks, to ensure that your body is holding and you’re remaining pain-free.

From there, some people choose to continue with some form of maintenance. Some people are better at feeling when something isn’t quite right in their body, and book as soon as they feel a twinge or tightness. While others book themselves in advance, knowing that they’re sometimes too busy to remember or don’t always realise that their body has slowly deteriorated…