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Physical therapy is not just recovery after injury or helping you get out of pain. Physical therapy allows for improvement in our quality of movement, improvement of strength, avoidance of surgery, and getting off pain medication so that you can live the life you love. We specialize in improving efficiency of movement to help you get rid of pain and to keep pain from coming back. So much of why we have pain comes from inefficient movement patterns and wear and tear on our joints and muscles. Our bodies can be well-oiled machines, but they need to function efficiently to decrease your pain, improve your quality of life, and return you to all of the activities you love to do.
No, this is the most common misconception that we have as physical therapists. Physical therapists are the primary movement specialists in the medical field. This means that we can typically tell you what hurts by just looking at the way you move. This means that not only can we help you recover from injuries, but we can also help prevent them. Have you ever known anyone that has had pain on just one side of their body? This is usually due to a movement dysfunction. Just like a car with a bad alignment will typically wear down one set of tires faster than the others, untreated misalignment can become the difference between needing a hip or knee replacement in 10 years verses living your best life without any pain at all. We can also help improve athletic performance and keep you active throughout lifetime. These are just a few of the ways physical therapy can help you.
Each visit will be about 45 minutes long. The first visit is all about you telling us your story. We want to ensure that you feel heard and confident in the plan personally designed for you, so you can get back to your life. We will also begin treatment in your first session so that we can begin the healing and recovery process. We will finish up the visit with a couple of home exercises and some education to ensure that our plan is the right plan for you to achieve all of your goals from physical therapy.
The good news is you do not need a referral prior to scheduling your first visit. If you do plan on using insurance, requirements for referrals and coverage will vary based on your policy. But, we can treat you without a referral. As physical therapists, we are movement specialists and our ability to tell dysfunction and problem areas comes from assessing the way you move. This means that we do not need an x-ray or a MRI in order to treat you. These tools can at times be beneficial, but they are not a requirement for every injury and waiting to start your treatments until after imaging is just prolonging your pain and keeping you from returning to your life.
The typical medical insurance model calls for more patients and less quality of care. The cash model calls for better quality and individualized care. If you have ever been to physical therapy before, you probably saw the therapist for just a couple of minutes and you were being treated with 3 and sometimes 4 other patients. This is not an indictment on the physical therapy, but it is a statement on the trajectory of the medical field as a whole. We give patients high quality one-on-one care to ensure that you are getting the results that you are looking for.
In general, physical therapy should not be painful. However, when things are not moving well, tissues can become inflamed. This will cause the tissues to become tender, painful, or sometimes swollen. In order to help improve these, we have to improve the quality of the movement, which can sometimes be painful depending on what stage of healing you are in. In order to know the difference, we must understand what defines good pain and bad pain. Good pain includes general muscle soreness following a strenuous activity, a slight burning or stretching feeling during physical therapy. Some examples of bad pain include: sharp, stabbing pain and pain that does not relieve itself following physical therapy. If you feel like physical therapy is too painful, then I would trust your gut. It typically is not a healing pain in those scenarios.
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