Does PT Work??

“I’ve Done Physical Therapy Before, Why does ______ Keep Happening?”

Is this a question you’ve wondered about before? Maybe an old knee injury that improves for a few months and then after a hard workout or weekend doing yard work it flares back up? Sound familiar? We hear this quite frequently with our patients.

When you attend physical therapy with us here at Breakaway Physical therapy we look at rehabilitation a little bit differently.

Did you complete your physical therapy plan of care before? Or once you started feeling better, did you just stop going? While we are so happy when our patients feel less pain, it’s important to complete the FULL plan of care to get the most lasting benefit of your treatment.

Just because you are pain free does not mean you are ready to resume higher intensity activity just yet!

Second, we like to zoom in and zoom out on the problem area. Just focusing on knee strengthening isn't enough for a knee injury. We need to look above and below the joint. If you didn’t also work on strengthening the hip joint, after a knee injury, its very likely you’ll keep reinjuring the knee.

We will assess your functional activities, such as what happens when you lift up your child or grandchild. You tweaked your knee, but if your spine position gets a little wonky, and you start putting extra pressure in other areas, its easy to injure or reinjure.

Finally, how are you maintaining after you finished physical therapy? Have you stayed active, or did you relax a little too much?

If we don’t follow up with our maintenance exercises and progress them, we can get reinjured. There’s a reason we call it a home exercise program!

When you attend physical therapy, you might see us for about 3 hours per week. There’s a whole lot of time you aren’t with us. Especially once you are discharged. Keeping up with those exercises and progressing them how we’ve taught you makes sure that not only the involved body part stays strong but really all the surrounding areas that can impact it.

Think of it like this: once you go to the dentist to get your teeth professionally cleaned, you don’t stop brushing your teeth afterwards right? They are clean and you want to maintain that level of clean.

If you find yourself repeatedly aggravating an old injury and can’t figure out what you’ve done this time, give our office a call (410-721-6333) to get set up with a complimentary consult today!

Don’t wait for your injuries to come back, call us so that we can get you set-up on a path to long-term healing and enjoying life!!