Your Treatment Plan 
I write plans down, and I include the point at which I would stop. Both of those are deliberate.
What is in it. What I think is going on. What I am doing and why. What you are doing — the loading exercises, the positioning, the timing change — with enough detail to actually follow: which exercise, how many, how often, how uncomfortable it is allowed to be, and when it increases. The measure we are tracking. The number of sessions before we should know. The total cost. And the exit: what would make me stop or refer.
Why the exit matters. Without it, a course of treatment continues until the patient loses faith, which is a bad way to make a clinical decision and an expensive one. With it, we have both agreed in advance what failure looks like, and I am obliged to act on it.
What I re-test. The same movements or the same number, at four weeks, rather than asking how it feels. People are generous about progress and it does them no favours.
What is never in a plan: a pre-paid package, a discount for committing before we know anything, or a standing fortnightly appointment with no end. If you have been sold any of those elsewhere, it is worth asking what the review criteria were.
The clinic is in Lane Cove, opposite the library, and the plan goes to your GP.
A treatment plan is a proposal with a review date attached. It says what is being done, how often, and when the two of you will stop and look at whether it is helping. Without that last part it is not a plan — it is an open-ended arrangement, and those tend to continue out of habit.
Most plans start closer together and spread out. Something recent and acute may need a short run of visits near the start; something that has been there for years usually moves more slowly, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The spacing is part of the treatment, not a scheduling convenience. Coming too rarely at the start can mean nothing holds between visits; coming too often later can mean paying for sessions that are no longer doing much.
Usually something small — a movement, a change to how you sit or sleep, something to notice and report back. Not homework for its own sake. An hour a fortnight is not where change happens; it happens in the time in between, and the session is where you work out what to change.
Agree at the start what you are watching. Not "do I feel better", which is hard to judge week to week, but something specific: sleeping through more nights, getting through a working day, being able to do the one thing you stopped doing.
Progress is rarely a straight line. A bad week after three good ones is ordinary. What matters is the direction over a month or two.
You should be told the fee for a first appointment and for follow-ups before you book, and whether there is any difference for longer sessions. If a plan involves a set number of visits, you should be able to work out the total before you agree to it — not discover it along the way.
If something is not covered or not included, that is worth asking about directly.
If nothing has shifted by the review point, that is information, not failure. It means the plan needs changing or that this is not the right approach for what you have. Both of those are better found at session six than session twenty.
A practitioner who only ever proposes more of the same is not reviewing anything.
Nothing in a plan here is a reason to start, stop or change anything your doctor has prescribed. If you want to reduce a medication, that is a conversation with whoever prescribed it, and it can happen alongside this work rather than instead of it.
The point of the plan is to not need it. What that looks like is worth knowing before you get there.
