If you’ve clicked over here from part one, you know that we’re about to dive into a conversation about physical therapy for injuries. I didn’t want this rather important bit to take away from my primary train of thought…and it kind of deserves its own treatment, hence the separate post.
It’s at this point that things have the potential to get rather more complicated because there are a variety of factors that conspire to make “going to physical therapy” difficult for some people to do.
I would also like to acknowledge that there is a significant difference between how the public views physical therapy and the role that (certain more awesome) physical therapists would like to play.
For the public, physical therapy is where you go when you’re injured so that you can rehabilitate and return to whatever it was you were doing before you were injured. In large part, this is probably probably a product of our (and by “our”, I mean Western societies’) sick-care approach to healthcare. We tend to only access healthcare when we are sick—or, in this case, injured.
Preventative maintenance? What’s that you say?
Physical therapy as a field wants to optimize movement as a means of improving health and overall quality of life. And, as I’ve alluded to many times before, you don’t have to be injured to get a movement check-up. (In fact, I went to get one just recently…part one, two, three).
That is all well and good, isn’t it? I doubt there will be anyone who reads this who thinks a periodic movement check-up isn’t a good idea. But here’s the thing: unless you happen to work for a company that keeps physical therapists on staff or you are fortunate enough to have really, really, great health insurance (or you’re an outlier), chances are you just are not going to go to see a physical therapist unless you’re injured.
And so, while your best option is definitely going to see a physical therapist (or ATC or movement-mined chiro), I also regularly screen the athletes that I work with so that we can stay ahead of the game, so to speak. So if you have access to a strength coach or personal trainer with movement-screening skills and know-how, that’s another option to explore.
And now, back to the original post…