Strength and mobility are essential for recovery, but it's possible to overdo it if you're not careful. Your physical therapist will discuss ways to balance physical therapy exercises and activities with adequate rest. The phrase “no pain, no gain” may be familiar, but it can lead to a harmful mindset. It also causes people to avoid physical health changes due to fear of discomfort.
Interestingly, while physical therapy can be a traumatic experience, the opposite is true. It's more likely to worsen injuries and prolong discomfort and pain if you don't seek care at a physical therapy center. Communicating with your therapist during each stage of rehabilitation is the only way to prevent this, and it's the best way to speed up your recovery. Your therapist will also closely monitor you while performing exercises to ensure they are done correctly and don't cause additional harm.
Physical therapists will examine you and evaluate your condition before designing an individualized treatment plan specific to your diagnosis. A variety of exercise techniques are chosen specifically for each patient's situation to treat bodily harm caused by injury, illness, or other medical conditions. You should be able to talk to your therapist about your physical comfort levels. If you don't follow your recovery program at home, it's hard for your therapist to know why your symptoms aren't improving or why they're getting worse and make any necessary adjustments.
When a person seeks a physical therapist, it's usually because they already have a medical problem and are looking for relief and healing. In these cases, both the doctor and the therapist can be held liable for damages related to the additional injury. Answering honestly and unreservedly is important to your therapist, since their job is to make modifications to eliminate any part of the treatment that may be causing you pain. However, through proper communication with your physical therapist, no treatment should cross the line between uncomfortable and painful.
Let's say you're recovering from knee surgery and your therapist is doing exercises to increase range of motion and strengthen the affected area. People think physical therapy is so difficult because they don't know what physical therapists are doing. While it's not uncommon to feel pain after physical therapy, you should never experience severe pain. Therapists are trained to pay close attention to you during treatment and will do everything they can to reduce pain. Seeing a physical therapist will show you that there are different types of solutions for rehabilitation and that they aren't as horrible as you might think; they're not here to torment you.
Your physical therapist will develop a treatment plan, but that plan will only work if you want it.
