When you’re down with an injury or experiencing pain with activity, you may be wondering about anything besides medicine. Our pain can feel so big sometimes that it can be hard to believe the solution doesn’t have to be extreme. If you read our newsletters, you may have noticed in the past few weeks we’ve described each of the 3 steps of our rehab process. Following these 3 steps, we help people solve their pain problems without the use of injections, pain meds, or surgery.
When you arrive for your first follow up visit after your eval, our top priority is “putting out the fire”. We use all the passive treatment and muscle activation techniques we can to get rid of your symptoms. This part isn’t hard. Reducing and eliminating symptoms can happen pretty easily if we know exactly what is going on. But the journey doesn’t end here, and if we stop working at this point we can almost guarantee the problem will return. We call this phase reset.
The next phase is called restore. In this phase, we are working a little more aggressively on the source of the problem. Whether it be joint stiffness, tissue tightness, or muscle weakness, we are now working to challenge that area without the risk of flaring it up (we already got rid of the symptoms). At this point, differences are really made, and the improvements that you started feeling in phase 1 are becoming more permanent.
The last phase is called reload. We have the most fun here. It’s the moment we’ve waited fo r- unrestricted movement. At this point we want to push the limit. It’s important as we know there’s nothing we could do to bring those symptoms back.
If you have questions about how we’d use our 3 step process to address your issue, holler at us!
Dr. Rachel Atufunwa, PT, DPT