Understanding Physical Therapy
What is "physical therapy"?
Physical therapy is a health care specialty that is focused on evaluating, diagnosing and treating people with musculoskeletal problems, specific exercises focused on your particular physical limitation. They may also be involved in wound care. They can be involved in pain management, if a particular physical condition is particularly painful, and this is a very common component of physical therapy: managing someone's pain, and then restoring their physical abilities or teaching them how to compensate for some limitations that they may have in their physical abilities.
How does a physical therapist assess my condition?
A physical therapist, when they're evaluating you and diagnosing your particular issue, they're going to ask you a lot of questions about what you're physically able to do, or what you were able to do before a particular event happened to you. If you were injured in a car accident and you're having difficulty walking, they're going to want to know what you were able to do before the car accident happened.Then they're going to do a physical examination on you, and take a look at your particular individual limitations. If you're not able to move your arm because of a broken bone in your arm, they're going to evaluate what you can do with that arm, and what you're not able to do with that arm. Then they can formulate a pain management and an exercise program to help restore your limitations in that arm, or teach you how to do things in a new way as long as you're going to have that particular limitation.
Can physical therapy decrease my need for pain medication?
Physical therapy can help you with your pain management, and often I see that patients who are participating in a physical therapy program require less pain medicine. The goal would be, hopefully if the therapy is working well, to help you reduce your pain, that we would be able to stop you having to take the medications by mouth. Now sometimes a therapy program can be more painful in the beginning before it actually starts to relieve your pain. So don't give up on your physical therapy if you find it's painful in the beginning, but make sure you're letting the therapist and your physician who may be supervising the program - make sure you let them know what type of pain, or how you're experiencing pain while you're doing the physical therapy. It may be a normal occurrence before you get to a pain free state.
