Tips Report
at mPower Physical Therapy
10 Tips report on Everything You need to know about Physical Therapy to help you regain or maintain your mobility for LIFE without Pain Pills, Medications or Injections.
Here are my 10 Tips report on Everything You need to know about Physical Therapy to help you regain or maintain your mobility for LIFE without Pain Pills, Medications or Injections.
Tip #1: MRI – Imaging and MRI often leads to overtreatments such as expensive surgeries.
The research on imaging is not great. If you take 100 people with no pain or problems (they are able to do everything) and image them, 60-80% of people will show arthritis, degeneration, RTC tears, meniscal tears, etc. It is a part of the aging process and the percentage goes up as we age. Much like getting wrinkles on our face.. It just happens. But now you have pain and you get imaging. Is what was imaged there before your injury? You don’t know…
Tip #2 How we feel pain and why drugs and injections don’t work…
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine if you need to medication or just come in and see a movement specialist in physical therapy.
- Does your pain come and go? – Not chemical
- Can you move and increase or decrease your pain? – Not chemical
Tip #3 Where you pain is located is not often where the source of the pain is located
There is a process. Phase 1: you have to figure out where the sources of the problem are and figure out what you are doing in your daily activities that can be contributing to the problem. This can be multiple issues going on as most of the time you have been compensating for years that eventually breaks the bottom down. You can not go to strengthening without figuring out the source.
Phase 2: Now once we get to the source, you now need to work on the muscle and tightness imbalances. By the time patients get to physical therapist it has been a few months to years. So with injuries that have been around for a while, there will be compensation which causes weakness in areas and tightness in other areas. This needs to be address next.
Phase 3: Getting you back to your activities you love safely. This can be breaking down your technique with whatever activity you want to get back to and progressing your training safely. No many physical therapy offices can do this part. They usually will just let you go when the pain is taken care of.. Then you get back too fast to activities and the pain returns due to tissue tolerance (tissue not tolerating the load or activity by doing too much too soon).
Tip# 4 80% of injuries do NOT need surgery.
We do more surgeries in this country because you guessed it.. We do MRI and imaging without thoroughly evaluating a patient due to lack of time healthcare providers can spend with the doctors. It is easy to do a test and give you a pill or say lets do surgery, because it takes less time. Now I am not say thing happens all the time, but it happens more often than not. Doctors do not know what physical therapist can do, because not all physical therapist are the same. You go to a physical therapist that can not spend time with you and does cookie cutter exercises and it does not work. Which comes to my next tip…
Tip #5 How do you know a Physical Therapist or facility is going to be the right for me.
- Do I get to see the physical therapist one on one for every treatment?
- Can I sit down with the physical therapist to see if they can help me without spending money?
- Do you have any education materials I can read about my condition written by someone in your facility (not from google)?
- Can you give me any ideas or examples of patients you have seen in the past with my condition? Can you give me an example?
Tip #6 How is physical therapy different than chiropractors, massage therapist and personal trainers.
Tip # 7 Common Questions: Does physical therapy hurt?
Tip #8 Common Questions: What do I wear?
Tip #9 Common Questions? How do I know this Physical Therapy is Right for me?
Tip #10 Common Questions: When will I see results?