Back pain treatment that carries on into strength.
Three licensed physiotherapists on Sukhumvit Soi 23, a short walk from Asok BTS and Sukhumvit MRT. Treatment first, then the training that keeps it from coming back.
The first consultation is free. If you are happy with the plan, treatment can start the same visit, at ฿2,500 + VAT for a 45-minute session. Claiming on insurance? We supply the documents your provider asks for.
This page covers what we do about back pain, including the cases where physiotherapy is the wrong answer and you should be somewhere else.
What is causing your back pain.
Most people arrive having already decided it is a disc. Sometimes that is right. More often, in the cases we see, the pain comes from how the body has been loading and moving for months or years, and the back is where it finally showed up.
Muscles that should be working stop working. Others take over and get overworked and irritable. Joints that should move freely stiffen, and the ones above and below them move more to compensate. None of it looks dramatic on a scan. All of it hurts.
That changes what treatment is for. If the problem is structural, you need imaging and a specialist, and we will tell you so. If it is how you load and move, rubbing the sore spot helps for about three days and then you are back where you started. That gap between short-term relief and the cause changing is where a lot of back pain treatment falls short.
There is also the answer nobody wants. A lot of back pain settles on its own within a few weeks, whatever anyone does to it. If you tweaked your back on Saturday and it is already easing, you may not need us at all. We would rather say that than sell you a package.
Labels, and what sits behind them.
Two problems can feel the same to the person living with them and need different treatment. That is why the assessment matters more than the label.
Sciatica
A description, not a diagnosis. It means pain travelling down the leg along the path of the sciatic nerve, and several different things can produce it. Some come from a disc pressing on a nerve root, others from the nerve being irritated further down by tight tissue around it.
Herniated or bulging disc
Real, and also one of the most over-attributed findings. Discs change shape with age much as hair goes grey, and plenty of people with no pain would show something on a scan. A disc finding is information. What matters is whether your symptoms match it.
Lower back pain
Most of what we see. Usually stiffness through the hips and mid-back, with the lumbar spine taking load those two should have shared. Upper back and neck pain often comes from the same desk, expressed higher up.
After spinal surgery
A different job again. The surgeon sets the constraints and we work inside them. Bring the operation notes and whatever you were told about restrictions and timelines.
Skip us and go to a hospital.
Some back pain is a medical problem and belongs at a hospital rather than a physiotherapy clinic. Get seen the same day if any of these apply.
Mostly talking, then watching you move.
The first consultation is free, and you can book it directly. No referral or scan needed.
We take the history properly: when it started, what makes it worse, what it stops you doing, what has been tried and what happened. The most useful sentence is usually the one about what you can no longer do without thinking about your back.
Then we watch you move. Bending, rotating, loading one leg, getting off a chair, walking. We test where movement is restricted and where it is guarded, and what is weak against what is only painful. Weak and painful are different problems with different answers.
You leave knowing what we think is going on, what we would do about it, roughly how long it should take, and what would make us send you to a doctor instead. If you do not need treatment, that is what we tell you.
Calm it down, then load it.
Which techniques you get depends on what the assessment found, never on what we happen to like doing.
Hands-on work
Joint and spine mobilisation, deep tissue and sports massage, trigger point therapy and myofascial release. This phase buys you room to move. It calms things down and restores range so the next phase is possible.
Loading
Once you can move without guarding, the muscles that stopped working are taught to work again, then loaded until they hold up under a normal life. People skip this phase because the pain has gone. It decides whether you are back here in eight months.
Between sessions
A small number of specific exercises, each with a clear reason. Forty minutes of exercises gets abandoned by Thursday. If something will not fit into your week, tell us and we will give you something that does.
From treatment to training.
A clinic discharges you when the pain has gone. That is a reasonable place for a clinic to stop, and it is the point where most people go back to the life that produced the problem. Nothing underneath has changed, and it recurs.
Aspire is a coaching studio with a physiotherapy practice inside it. Your physiotherapist hands you to a strength coach with what they found, what is still fragile and what to avoid for the next six weeks. You do not explain your back again to a stranger at a gym.
Boom Namsak is both a physiotherapist and a strength coach, which is where that handover works best. For most people with recurring back pain, the strength phase is the treatment and everything before it was preparation.
The Bangkok desk problem.
A large share of the back pain we see in Bangkok is not an injury at all. It is nine hours at a desk, ninety more minutes sitting in a commute, air conditioning that keeps everything cold and stiff, and a gym habit dropped somewhere around the second year here.
Office syndrome is the local shorthand for it. The name is vague. The pattern is real.
The fix is unglamorous. It is rarely one chair or one stretch. Break up the total sitting load, get rotation and extension back into a spine that spends all day flexed, and build enough strength that eight hours of static posture is nowhere near your limit. We wrote about the daily habits that quietly make it worse, and most of them are things people do not think of as habits.
What it costs.
We assess the cause and show you the treatment plan, and you decide whether to act on it. If we do not think we are the right people, we say so.
The same physio every session.
You will be treated by Boom Namsak, Gino Udomthanakij or Som Benjaprasertsri. All three are licensed physiotherapists working in English and Thai. Boom also works as a strength coach, so he tends to pick up the cases where rehabilitation carries on into proper training.
Continuity matters more than it sounds. The useful information in a rehabilitation case is the change between sessions, and that is hard to read if a different person is looking each week.
For a lot of people, both.
Bangkok has excellent hospitals, and there are cases where one of them is plainly the right answer. If you have red flag symptoms, go there first.
Diagnosis and procedures
- Imaging and specialist opinions
- Injections and surgery
- Short appointments, rarely the same therapist twice
- Discharge when the pain has gone
The long tail of rehab
- Assessment and hands-on treatment
- The same physiotherapist each session
- Strength coaches on site
- Working with you until you are robust again
Get the diagnosis where diagnosis is done properly, then do the rehabilitation somewhere that will still be working with you three months later.
Back pain, answered.
Do I need a referral or a scan before I come?
No. You can book the free consultation directly. If we think you need imaging or a specialist opinion, we will tell you in that session and say why.
How long until the pain goes?
It depends on what is causing it and how long it has been there, and anyone who gives you a number before assessing you is guessing. We give you an estimate after the first session and tell you if we are not on track.
Will you just give me a massage?
Hands-on work is one part of it. If manual therapy alone were enough, the problem would have stayed fixed the last time somebody worked on your back.
Can I keep training while I am being treated?
Usually yes, with modifications. Stopping everything is rarely the right call and often makes recovery slower. We will tell you what to change rather than what to stop.
Is it covered by insurance?
Physiotherapy is covered under most international policies, often subject to a referral or a session limit. We provide the paperwork. Check your own terms with your provider first.
Do you speak English?
Yes. The clinic works in English and Thai, and a good part of our client base is the Sukhumvit expat community.
Where exactly are you?
Jasmine City, 2nd Floor, Sukhumvit Soi 23, Asok. Walking distance from Asok BTS and Sukhumvit MRT.