Physical therapy is all about utilizing your innate healing abilities to reduce pain and get you back to doing what you love. A rehab plan should be highly individualized based on what symptoms you're experiencing, lifestyle factors, prior movement history, and outcome goals. A holistic physical therapy plan of care should always involve addressing mobility deficits, improving strength of movement, and addressing confounding lifestyle factors.

 

So how does this work? Firstly, there are two types of pain: acute pain and chronic pain.

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Acute pain is defined as discomfort that usually comes on suddenly due to a specific incident and lasts less than a month. Acute pain is treated through rehab by harnessing the body's natural inflammatory process to promote healing and improve tissue quality. Treatment involves managing inflammation while strengthening compromised tissue so you can come back from injury stronger than ever.

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Chronic pain is defined as discomfort that lasts longer than the expected healing process or pain that is due to a chronic health issue. Chronic pain occurs due to complex dysfunction of multiple systems of the body, but especially the nervous and immune systems. Treatment for chronic pain requires addressing all the dysfunctional systems and managing any underlying health conditions through both conservative and medical interventions when indicated. Physical therapy for chronic pain involves utilizing movement to block the pain signals from the body from reaching the brain and reducing the low levels of inflammation that occur with chronic pain. Because chronic pain involves some underlying dysfunction of the nervous system, stress management through breathing techniques and pacing your activities is also critical for management and recovery.

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Bringing it all together, physical therapy treats both acute pain from injury and chronic pain due to both unknown factors and underlying health conditions by teaching you to harness the power of your immune and nervous systems to help modulate your pain and promote healing.