The thing that gets me most about physical therapy is how much bullshi’t is involved in it these days. There are people out there with legitimate problems, yet the practice is outdated.
People are usually sent to physical therapy to rehabilitate a broken bone, torn muscles/ligaments or even a dislocation. Rest, massages and pain killers are fine, but once the injury begins to heal, strength training is important for recovery. This is where physical therapy comes in.
The best physical therapy is intense strength training. To achieve this safely, machines are preferred. Unfortunately, there are a lot of physical therapy places that resort to cardio and stretching. Both are either ineffective to the healing process and even be damaging.
The treadmill for example is very high impact on the joints. The stationary bike isn’t as effective for strengthening the leg muscles as a slow, controlled leg press. It’s unfortunate, but many physical therapy places still run with this kind of bullshi’t.
I pulled my hamstring a few years ago and the doctor scheduled therapy for it. They had me do a lot of static stretching, hot pads and light exercise. I don’t want to even get started on the negative effects of stretching, but the exercise they had me do was pathetic. It was light weight with high reps. I didn’t even break a sweat.
The body requires a strong enough physical stimulus to grow. What was the point of them giving me easy shi’t to do? I’m suppose to struggle to build myself back up. Starting with a reasonably intense weight, the patient should be struggling to move the weight. The exercise should be performed slow and controlled with smooth reversals from pushing to pulling and vice versa. This should be done until failure preferably with machines for safety.
At first, the patient is going to be weak, but the muscle will soon regain it’s strength and get even stronger. This will protect it from future injuries.
I have the exact opposite problem. I have a connective tissue disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome that causes extremely weak ligaments, easy joint dislocations, muscle hypotonia, and tendon degeneration. I have seen one good physical therapist in my life, and now I live 2000 miles away from her in another state. All the physical therapists I have seen in this state have been horrible. They are very oriented towards athletes and people who do high-impact work such as firefighters and police officers, and few if any of them have any experience with or interest in patients with complex long-term hereditary musculoskeletal problems. As a result, I have gotten the “no pain, no gain” routine on a regular basis and been treated like I was lazy for refusing to do exercises that were too painful or toohigh-impact for me. One physical therapist severely injured my right knee: another exacerbated that injury and probably tore the labrum in my hip (the MRI report shows the tear, and I’m pretty sure that was the physical therapist who did it, because I couldn’t walk for almost a month after I saw her–and I had only seen her for one week). So high-impact exercises are not the answer for everyone. I believe the real problem with physical therapists nowadays is that the profession is far too easy to get into and not as well-regulated as it should be, and as a result it attracts lazy people with a one-size-fits-all mentality who really can’t be bothered to help the patient – it’s just another day, another dollar to them.
totally agree! I had a broken tibia plateau injury after 3 months of healing and it almost being completely healed I twisted it wrong rebroke the bone in the same place– also tore and pulled acl mcl and my meniscus I was laid up for another 2 and a half mnths and now am just starting to walk again with a walker… The first time physical therapy had me do a bunch of nonsense exercises that did nothing., then they had me stretch which did nothing. they went over some exercises to do then handed me papers to do on my own at home. the paperwork looked like copies of something written in 1955, No massage, no tens, no wave machine no strength training and they wanted me to go back 3x a week for 5 weeks, I stopped going after 3 sessions realizing the whole thing was a giant money grab. I’ve done my own research and am getting much more out of rehabbing myself at home safely and effectively.