What Does Therapy Cost?

It Depends.

Factors include treatments, medical conditions, and your improvement motivations.  Of course, the amounts your insurance company contributes widely varies.  

Some vertigo patients are treated in a single therapy session.  The national average is 10 - 12 therapy sessions.  

Patients like Mike who are wheelchair bound and want to dance again may well be in therapy for six months.  Patients with degenerative diseases like Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinsons may well see benefits, though temporary.  

Patients with Medicare can often expect a therapy session to cost about the same as taking grandkids to lunch (which may well be a goal of therapy!)  Those with Medicare supplements may not have an out of pocket expense, though commercial patients will have less predictable costs based.

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

The costs of not going to therapy are more predictable.  

• Consumer Reports' article The Right Way to Recover From a Fall note that "one-fifth of falls cause significant injuries" such as traumatic brain injuries with "more than 300,000 adults...hospitalized for [hip fractures] each year." Their therapy is significantly longer:  "for various fall-related injuries, PT can take months or more than a year." So preventative patients could succeed at outpatient therapy and take the grandkids to lunch before the fall-injured patient gets discharged from inpatient therapy.
• The Journal of the American Medical Association reports patients with "recurrent vertigo--MD, VM, and BPPV--had considerable medical costs associated with them" often nearing $10,000 per year.  Concerningly, they found 43,901 BPPV patients had an average cost of $8,247 which is dozens of times higher than the cost of an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor diagnosing BPPV and referring to physical therapy for the Epley maneuver and follow up.
• Most grimly, the CDC reports "fall death rates in the U.S. INCREASED 30% from 2007 to 2016 for older adults [and] if rates continue to rise, we can anticipate 7 fall deaths every hour by 2030."  "In 2020, emergency departments recorded 3 million visits for older adult falls."  Proactive patients can follow CDC's action steps, which repeatedly include physical therapy.