The “Preferred Practice Method”

Regular physical therapy offices will ask “what’s your name, date of birth, and insurance?” after you mention you are looking to be a patient. The sad thing is, nothing feels wrong about it because that’s how our doctor, dentist, and every other health care practice operates. What if instead, the person on the other end of the phone sounded like a real human trying to help you solve your problem? We want to know what is going on, how it’s affecting you, and what you want to accomplish by coming to a specialty physical therapy clinic. We want to help you! And having this conversation gives us the opportunity to determine if we’ll be a good fit to help you succeed and if we can work with you toward your health goals … all before we take any money from you.

Patients come to us looking for solutions to the pain in their nerves, muscles, and joints. Many are caught up in wanting to know what tissue is broken and causing pain, assuming that if they can solve it they wouldn’t be in pain anymore. Almost as if you can find the area where the pain is and inject it with medicine all the pain will go away… but that’s not how it works! We know this because those injections exist and patients come to us after those injections have failed. The painful site and broken down tissue are just a symptom, and if you only treat the symptom the pain will come back. In this step, we do a thorough evaluation of how you move, what muscles are weak, how your body compensates for that weakness, and how your body responds to hands-on treatment and exercises. This can take a few visits to fully understand how your body is connected to your pain. Taking time to identify the Root Cause of your pain significantly strengthens our ability to prescribe successful hands-on treatment and therapeutic exercises.

This is a crucial step to helping you overcome pain so you can live free from pain killers and avoid surgery and injections. This is our prescription to help you get better and stay better, naturally. Regular physical therapy’s model is based on volume, seeing 3-4 patients per hour making it nearly impossible to avoid giving common exercises with very little hands-on treatment. With a Personalized Plan of Care, you will understand why we’re prescribing you exercises and choosing specific hands-on treatment with feedback from you about what is working and what you’re comfortable with. This will include understanding things that might get in the way of your success such as your work schedule, vacations, financial considerations, and time constraints to best put together a plan for you.

Along the way we re-evaluate and compare what we found at the beginning of treatment to what we are finding now… is it different? Are we on the right path? Are we seeing the changes we need to arrive at your goal? There are only 3 possible outcomes from this re-evaluation.

Some cases can include multiple re-evaluations depending on how long you have suffered from pain and how many places we need to treat to get it resolved.

Our bodies work to be as efficient as possible and adapt to demands we place on them. Too often those demands are a rigid routine of sitting sprinkled with sporadic exercise. We can go weeks, months, and sometimes years without physically challenging our bodies correctly to avoid breakdowns in movement and strength that lead to pain. The best way to stay free from pain killers, injections, and surgery is to be strategic with your exercise and activity to include challenges to strength, endurance, balance, mobility, and power. Once you finish treatment, we will have a discussion to see if you are a candidate for our Preferred Fitness program designed to help you keep the improvements you made during treatment and help keep you that way in the future.