You have pain or an injury so you go to physical therapy right? But what about if you went to physical therapy before pain or injury happened? Wouldn’t it be great to prevent an issue from occurring in the first place?
This is what preventative physical therapy is all about. You don’t have to wait to have an issue before you see a physical therapist.
Physical therapists are experts in the musculoskeletal system. This means they are experts at assessing your strength, flexibility, and mobility. By assessing these aspects of the body even when you are feeling good, you can prevent issues from occurring in the future.
Let’s look at an example to understand how this can help. Think about a rotator cuff tear, a tear in a tendon in your shoulder. This type of issue may sound like something that would only happen with a specific cause of injury, but rotator cuff tears can happen without any specific cause of onset. What can happen is that if the stabilizing muscles of the shoulder are weak, it can change how the shoulder joint moves. If the shoulder joint isn’t moving in the way it should, it can cause pinching of the rotator cuff tendons which over time could cause a tear.
Now, think about if you went to preventative physical therapy. You have no pain in your shoulder but your physical therapist found that you have weakness in the shoulder stabilizing muscles. They teach you exercises to strengthen these muscles and PREVENT a rotator cuff tear from occurring in the future.
I don’t know about you, but I think the second option sounds a lot better than the first.
RADECT Health is building ways to add preventative physical therapy into our practice both online in new ways. We also integrate physical therapy into our team based care.
Written by Dr. Tara Salay
