Be Careful When Attempting to DIY Your Physical Therapy

There are so many DIY solutions for everything on the internet, it’s tempting to try to solve your unrelenting musculoskeletal pain, especially with your busy schedule but self-diagnosing your physical therapy treatment with an online video or technique to heal your own body is not a good idea.

These DIY physical therapy cures may cause more harm than good.  A Physical Therapist becomes an expert on body movement through years of schooling covering all aspects of the human body.  In addition, the physical therapy methods learned through continuing education after graduation assures a licensed physical therapist will keep up with all the cutting-edge treatment approaches; Not to mention, the years of experience in healing patients with muscular pain and injuries.

These are just a few of the reasons a physical therapist is equipped with the understanding to analyze a patient’s movement and visually get to the root cause of the painful problems.

Let’s look at a DIY Example

The DIY patient has nagging back pain and attempts to treat the pain with a DIY PT APP.  The pain becomes frustrating due to a lack of progress within this DIY solution.  The patient finally decides to see a professional Physical Therapist, who observes how the patient walks and recognizes the pain in the lower back is coming from dysfunctional leg muscles and an odd pattern of shuffled walking.  The Pro PT demonstrates some leg strengthening exercises and a mode of practicing walking better, which results in pain relief and better mobility.

An important thing to remember about your body is the complicated network of muscles, tendons, bones, and ligaments which are designed to function together.  When you attempt to do DIY Physical Therapy, with an injured or weak part of the body, there is a tendency to overcompensate or re-develop your movements to reduce the pain or movements from the injury.  Most of the time, your efforts on a DIY basis may cause increased pain in a different area of your body.

Another example

Another example of DIY Physical Therapy is an attempt to find a YOUTUBE video with basic, standardized solutions.  These typically can’t replace the very personalized rehabilitation program designed by a professional physical therapist.

During your first visit with Mountain View Physical Therapy, your professional physical therapist will carefully listen to every part of your pain and possible background reasons for the pain or injury.  By asking detailed questions and performing a series of routine tests to analyze your muscles and pain, your Mountain View Physical Therapist will observe your movement and get extremely detailed about the root cause of your pain and ways to adapt exercise and patterns to alleviate your pain and strengthen your muscles.  By prescribing a program which combines all these factors together, with realistic goals, your physical therapist can examine your progress during each subsequent visit, while adding additional exercise routines to help you on the path towards improvement and pain relief.

Another Challenge of DIY Physical Therapy, from a self-diagnosing from internet blogs and videos, is that it exposes you to the risk of an incorrect diagnosis.

Pain signals can come from a variety of locations in many forms. Nagging, throbbing pain can be the result of an injured muscle, while sharp, shooting pain may be the result of a more serious injury requiring immediate medical attention.  Inflammation can either be a healthy sign of the healing process, or a lingering inflammation can be caused from weeks of a more serious injury like a hairline fracture.

Alternatively, the licensed, professional physical therapist experts at Mountain View Physical Therapy combine a complete doctoral education of the musculoskeletal system, with anatomy, chemistry, physics along with years of study of the body systems.  Their continuing education in courses to maintain their license, allows them to learn new and improved ways to care for you, like acoustic wave therapy and red-light therapy.

By going way beyond normal levels of training, the licensed physical therapists at Mountain View Physical Therapy provide a multidimensional level of treatments and exercise programs that will assess your needs and give you personalized education in recognizing signals which might be causing harm or pain.  This physical therapy intervention process continues to help you assess whether your treatments and exercises are targeting your pain problems with solutions or hindering your progress. 

Sometimes a DIY Physical Therapy Process Can Use the Right Exercises But With an Incorrect Form

Many times, a DIY practitioner doesn’t have the expertise with the musculoskeletal system, so they may cause an unintentional movement which can negatively affect other muscles and body systems. Trying to perform your own DIY physical therapy increases the chance of performing the right exercise in the wrong way.  You can injure yourself by watching a video or reading a document that doesn’t provide you the valuable feedback and not provide feedback if you are performing the exercise incorrectly.

By using the licensed physical therapy techniques and three decades of experience of Mountain View Physical Therapy, with their deep knowledge about how the body works, they can recognize how performing effective exercises with the wrong technique can mean another serious injury.  It takes a trained physical therapist to correctly direct a treatment program for those complicated joints found in shoulders, which are jammed packed with nerves, tendons, and ligaments. Remember, don’t be the DIY physical therapist who completes exercises in the wrong order or technique and ends up with torn muscles or ligaments.

In summary, a licensed, trained professional therapist will help you:

• Develop exercises to help you achieve your goals
• Receive education on the correct form for each exercise
• Coach levels on how to maximize exercise impact
• Provide monitoring and warning signs such as pain so you’re safe to complete exercises outside of your session

Mountain View Physical Therapy is uniquely suited to help you reduce pain and exercise in a safer way.  Call us today or fill out the form to allow us to analyze your pain and immediate needs.