Do you ever wonder what physical therapy is like and why you may need it? You are not alone—a lot of people contact Fyzical Therapy and Balance Centers asking the same question.
What is physical therapy?
It is the treatment of conditions--such as soft tissue injuries, chronic and acute pain, arthritis, cartilage damage, gait disorders and physical impairments--through prescribed exercises, soft tissue and joint mobilization, electrotherapy, kinesiology, shockwave modality and health education. The treatment is used to improve mobility and function and involves physical examination, diagnosis, prognosis, physical intervention, rehabilitation and patient education.
Why physical therapy?
A physical therapist is an expert in movement and function. While there are several specialties in physical therapy, all of them aim to get patients back to their previous level of activity, avoid future injuries, help recovery from illness or medical conditions, and promote overall health and wellness.
You may need physical therapy to:
- Help with your mobility issues if you can’t move, stand or walk. Physical therapy includes muscle and joint strengthening and stretching exercises and procedures that boost mobility.
- Detect how the body reacts to different situations, diagnose movement and functional disorders and work with you to address and correct them.
- Achieve pain relief, including back pain, knee pain, neck pain and carpal tunnel pain.
- Improve recovery from stroke by increasing strength to various parts of the body, restoring balance and enhancing limb function.
- Reduce need for surgery—since pre-surgical therapy increases motion and reduces pain associated with various conditions, which may mean you opt out of surgery altogether.
Methodical effective therapy
Each physical therapy center has its own approach to care. At Fyzical Sarasota Downtown, we look at the whole person. Before we can recommend any treatment, we evaluate posture, coordination of movement, ADLs, bending, lifting and twisting, any existing pain, and how various physical systems coordinate. We examine the body comprehensively and use the information gathered to develop a treatment protocol that works. We also use the information to determine your optimal function the path you should follow to get there.
We have open and honest conversations about your goals and how you can achieve them. We spend time discussing your short-term and long-term goals, educating you on specific movement patterns and making suggestions on daily modifications to adjust poor habits. The therapy sessions are customized to fit your needs, the exercise and drills are specific to your goals, and the plan of care is centered on your schedule.
Best practices for better outcomes
The experience of observing many different approaches to treatment informs our preference for best practices. For example, a person with joint pain could be recommended five kinds of treatment plans if he were to visit five physical therapy centers. The reason for this is that there are many paths to getting better. For the patient, this makes the treatment course less certain and recovery time variable.
To ensure precision and consistency at Fyzical Therapy and Balance Centers, we have looked at various approaches and developed our own best practices and standards of care. In fact, we have a team of experts who study different conditions, research approaches, dig through data, and go into clinics to learn what they do. Using the latest information, we develop effective protocols, update our equipment, integrate new technologies and make our services as safe and effective as possible. For more information on how our physical therapy services can help you, visit the FYZICAL Sarasota Downtown website.