11 Mar 5 Reasons Physical Therapy Can Help Your Overall Health

Five Ways Physical Therapy Can Help Your Overall Health

A customized physical therapy program can help you achieve optimal functioning, and encourage activities and lifestyle changes that prevent  injury and improve overall health and well-being. Primary care doctors often refer patients to physical therapy at the first sign of a problem, since it is considered a conservative approach to managing persistent pain. Wondering what makes physical therapy so useful? Here are five ways it could benefit you:

Reduce or eliminate pain – Therapeutic exercises and manual therapy techniques such as joint and soft tissue mobilization or treatments such as ultrasound, taping or electrical stimulation can help relieve pain and restore muscle and joint function to reduce pain. These therapies can also prevent pain from returning. This can be particularly helpful for those suffering from chronic pain.

Improve mobility – If you’re having trouble standing, walking or moving, physical therapy can help. Stretching and strengthening exercises restore your capacity to move fluidly. By customizing an individual care plan, activities that are important to your life can be practiced and adapted to ensure safety, and improved performance.

Avoid surgery – Before pursuing surgery, it could be helpful to determine whether or not physical therapy can help eliminate or heal your injury. This can also reduce healthcare costs. If surgery is, indeed, required, you may benefit from pre-surgery physical therapy. Going into a surgery with increased strength, flexibility and stamina, could decrease your post-surgery recovery time.

Improve your balance and prevent falls – If you’re at high risk for falls, a physical therapist can provide exercises that safely and carefully challenge your balance, and increase your strength. Physical therapists can also suggest exercises to improve coordination.

Recover from or prevent a sports injury – Physical therapists understand the ways that different sports can increase your risk for specific kinds of injuries (such as stress fractures for distance runners, or tendonitis in the elbow for tennis players). They can design appropriate recovery or prevention exercise programs so that you can safely, and quickly return to playing your favorite sport.

Contact us to schedule a comprehensive evaluation, including diagnosis and customized program set-up.