This past weekend I took a day off work and my family drove up to PA for a wedding of an old but good friend of ours. The wedding was somewhat unique in how kid friendly it was but I think I enjoyed it more than any wedding I’ve been to in a long time as I watched my 3 and 1 year old dance the afternoon away. Driving home from that trip, they're obviously exhausted and they're at that age where they fall asleep with their head hanging, chin to chest, in front of themselves. You know, a position that would require any adult to require physical therapy for a month to fix the crick in the neck. But it makes for good thinking time.
I started thinking about two conversations I had at the wedding about two very different yet common experiences with physical therapy. The first gentleman is what you might call a nonbeliever. He hadn’t experienced physical therapy yet personally and whether it was because of things that he had heard, cultural reasons or internal assumptions, he thought physical therapy was a waste of time. It wasn’t until after having surgery that he realized how life changing it could be and that converted him. What if there was something he could have done before things progressed to that point of needning surgery that could have prevented the surgery altogether?
The second gentleman was willing to try physical therapy without any assumptions. His experience was not a positive one. He was given minimal exercises and often the physical therapist wasn’t directly present during the visit. He subsequently wasn’t seeing any results and so he took his exercise plan, went home to a local gym, increased the number of reps and slowly increased the resistance and gradually built up his strength on his own trying to figure things out as he went. Turns out, his therapy was under dosed and lacked supervision.
These two stories are very different but I think they represent a lot of people’s experience with physical therapy. They either have a wrong notion of what physical therapy is like or they have a bad experience and may dismiss it all together. One thing that I commonly try to explain to people is that physical therapy is kind of like going to a restaurant. You have to go to know what it’s really like and sometimes you have a great experience but sometimes you think “well I’m never going to go back to that restaurant again.” But one thing you don't say is “I’m never going to go to ANY restaurant again”.
There can be lots of reasons why physical therapy might not go well. But I created Renew Physical Therapy after seeing some of these frustrations that are legitimate and knowing there is a way to provide physical therapy in a way that avoids these all too common pitfalls. Do you have a Physical Therapist in your back pocket who can help you catch and resolve issues early? With Renew, you will be one-on-one with the Physical Therapist and this ensures we are giving you the proper exercises, appropriate volume, and helpful cues so that you don’t have to try and figure this out on your own. I know I'm biased but I'd say it's worth trying before we get to invasive measures like surgery.
