Celebrate National Physical Therapy Month 2018
A hip fracture or stroke can leave you immobilized and completely bed-bound. That’s where rehab services come in. At short-term rehab facilities like Bridgeway Senior Living, you receive top-notch physical, occupational, and speech therapy to help you regain your full abilities.
In October, the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) celebrates National Physical Therapy Month. Here at Bridgeway Senior Living, we join wholeheartedly in the celebration, because we see the incredible effects of PT on your health, your strength, and your quality of life.
What is Physical Therapy?
Physical therapists work to restore and maintain your maximum movement and muscle strength. In the long-term care space, they’re the ones who can help when aging, disease, or injury diminish your strength and function. Physical therapy helps you regain your abilities after a devastating illness or injury.
Stroke or fall victims who participate fully in their rehab and PT sessions can see astonishing progress. Very often, our rehab residents gain enough ability to move back home independently or with some basic help. And we’ve seen countless patients restored to their previous level of function!
But perhaps the most little-known benefit of PT is its pain-management affects.
Whether you’re in intense pain from a recent injury or illness, or you suffer from chronic pain since a long-ago procedure or injury, PT can help relieve your pain. Living with constant pain causes non-stop physical, emotional, and mental stress. It’s also one of the most common reasons people seek medical care.
Unfortunately, the conventional medical approach to pain relief has been to prescribe ever-increasing doses of pain medication, instead of getting to the root cause of the pain. Now, with the opioid crisis gaining more attention in the US, we need to find another way.
Physical Therapy is the Answer
Opioid drugs are natural or synthetic prescription painkillers. You might recognize brand name opioids, such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin. The illegal and highly dangerous version is heroin, which claims thousands of lives annually. Prescription opioids are not exactly innocent though. The rate of deaths involving prescription opioid has risen steadily since 1999, in tandem with their popularity as a valid prescription drug.
By now, the healthcare industry has acknowledge that prescription opioid addiction is a serious problem. Physical therapy can play an important part in ending this epidemic. Licensed physical therapists are experts in human movement, and they can use their knowledge and experience to not only assess your pain levels, but also find the specific movement patterns that are contributing to your pain.
Once they have that knowledge, they can work with you to retrain your muscles and body movements, resulting in permanent pain relief. Your physical therapist will also work closely with your other health care professionals to coordinate your care to get you the best possible outcome.
While PT involves a lot more work than simply taking a painkiller, it has none of the dangerous risks of addiction. What’s more, you can finally experience lasting pain relief, instead of having to constantly raise your dosage as your body gets used to the drug.
If you’re suffering from chronic pain, know that you don’t need to continue suffering. Physical therapy may just be the answer to years or decades of pain!