It seems like every injury nowadays comes with a full suite of physical therapy. It seems like the main goal is to recover faster, but how much faster? Can you just skip it if you’re in no hurry to recover?
I had a knee injury and my experience was that it wasn’t just about recovering faster, it was about recovering more fully and preventing re-injury.
While healing faster is a component of PT, retraining & strengthening surrounding and supporting muscle in order to avoid re-injury is as, or even more, important.
Two family members have had knee replacement surgery recently. One followed thru on her PT & exercises, the other didn’t (because “it hurts”). The one who didn’t has noticeably less range of motion in his knee, and seems to tire easier.
The first time I had a shoulder problem, the PT made so much difference that, the second time, I skipped the doctor and went straight to the PT.
The doc’s solution: Let’s dope you up on painkillers and if that doesn’t work we’ll cut into you. Okay, I’ll refer you to a PT if you insist.
1st visit to PT: eliminated most of the pain, added a considerable amount of range of motion. Things just got better after that.
(I did need the painkillers for the first couple of visits, though.)
A lot. For me, at least.
After a car accident years ago in which I received whiplash, crack in a vertebra and a seriously messed-up knee, the PT helped me build up the right muscles after surgery to support the damaged knee joint. Also, even after the vertebra was healed, I used to get seriously cramped muscles in the neck & shoulder area for a good while. The PT could magically tell exactly which muscle was knotted, and un-knot it in a couple of minutes. It was magic, I tell you, magic!
PTs also taught me some exercises to build up my abs & back to help with the arthritis I have in my spine. I would never have known there are really useful exercises you can do while lying down.
I had a torn rotator cuff repaired on January 15th, and have three days a week of PT prescribed through mid-May.
The therapy is very exacting – lots of movements involve the rotator cuff that you wouldn’t think. There’s a lot of stuff I had to avoid doing, and a lot I had to start doing as soon as the therapists instructed. There are also assisted stretching movements that you can’t do alone. It would not have been sufficient to have told me, “If it hurts, don’t do it” and let me work on my own.
I’m a lifelong exercise addict, so it was easy for me to do the homework they assigned. As a result, I’m healing faster than expected (my ex-boss had the same procedure from the same surgeon).
I realize that some operations require more PT than others, but I can’t imagine why anyone would undergo the hassle of rotator cuff surgery and then not bother with the less invasive benefits of PT.
My mother had eight stitches between her index and middle fingers on her left hand this summer. (Stupid kitchen accident). When she went to have the stitches removed, two weeks later, the doctor sent her across the way for a physcial therapy consultation. Mom was a little weirded out by this, but was assured that the physical therapists always had walk-in openings for the hand surgeon’s patients.
So she went. Her hand was massaged, she was given some advice on minimizing scarring, maximizing range of motion, and some exercises to do on her own. And then she was sent on her way.
While physical therapy is not neccessarily needed, anytime you have an injury like that where joints are immobilized for a length of time, there is a tendency for the joints to stiffen up, and for the muscles to weaken from lack of use. Physical therapy can help deal with these problems. Without physical therapy, one may not recover as completely.
When my friend hurt his leg, he was told the physical therapy was to ensure he retained a proper gait and not a limp.