One point we often express on our blog is that physical therapy is typically most effective when it’s pursued early and often following an injury or surgery. However, some people may take that to mean that if they don’t pursue PT right away, they might miss their window of opportunity and then there is no point in pursuing a rehab program. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While you would ideally begin strengthening and conditioning injured areas shortly after trauma, today’s blog focuses on why it’s never too late to pursue physical therapy for a lingering injury.
Physical Therapy Is Better Late Than Never
If you wait to pursue physical therapy after an injury or surgery, scar tissue can complicate healing or your body can start to put additional stress on other areas to compensate for the injured area. This can leave you facing new problems, but that doesn’t mean you’ve missed your window to benefit from PT, even if you don’t treat an injury until weeks, months or even years later. Here’s why PT is better late than never.
- Strengthen The Area – While early physical therapy intervention tends to allow a person to achieve maximum medical improvement and the greatest physical function, you can still notice strength and stability improvements in an area by pursuing targeted therapy at a later date. You can still build muscle and help the area better prepare itself to handle stress. You can also make an area stronger, even with delayed PT.
- Education – Your physical therapist is also a wealth of information about your condition and the best ways to treat it, so odds are you’ll learn something new no matter when you pursue PT after an injury or surgery. You can learn about effective exercises or the internal processes that are causing you discomfort, and the best ways to treat these issues. Knowing what you’re up against is very important in effective treatment.
- Coping Strategies – Physical therapy isn’t just about targeting an area until pain is gone, we can also teach you new strategies for managing pain and discomfort and how to best overcome them. We can explain how your posture or your running form could be contributing to your discomfort, and we can alter your form so that everyday actions don’t continue to make pain worse.
- You Only Get One Body – At the end of the day, you only get one body, so you owe it to yourself to do whatever you can to make it as physically fit as possible. You can’t actually turn back time, but through physical therapy, you can help slow down the aging process and limit natural degeneration so that you feel younger for longer. It’s never too late to start a therapy program that improves your physical function.
- You’ve Got Nothing To Lose – Finally, if you’ve been plagued by daily knee soreness or frequent headaches, you’ve literally got nothing to lose by seeing if PT can help lessen or alleviate your discomfort. Even if PT doesn’t prove to be all that effective, you’ll have pursued an active treatment that has no negative side effects like painkillers or pain injections can have. You might be out a little time and a small co-pay, but you have so much more to gain than you stand to lose by trying to treat an old injury with physical therapy.
To connect with a physical therapist who will do everything they can to help you overcome your new or existing injury, reach out to the team at OrthoRehab Specialists today.