The spectrum of physical therapy.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Healthcare

Physical therapy is an obvious step when one has suffered a traumatic physical event, especially having undergone any kind of surgery. In such cases, it's generally known that it will be necessary to follow a treatment plan that ensures that healing tissues are exercised in a safe and appropriate way to promote strength and prevent re-injury.

North Pole Physical Therapy

But physical therapists provide many services. Tim Stevenson, DPT, of North Pole Physical Therapy, says that his clients are split pretty evenly between traumatic injury recovery and consistent pains that may or may not have a clear origin, including pain stemming from a small or forgotten injury or chronic pain related to repetitive movement.

Stevenson says many factors contribute to how long a client may need physical therapy--the severity of the injury, age, how long the client has been experiencing pain, or other medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure can all have an effect. "Something that's been bothering someone for twenty years is going to take a lot more work than something that's been going on for two weeks," Stevenson says.

He says a relatively new development in the field of physical therapy is that, "especially with chronic pain, the understanding of what pain is helps people help just as well as anything that we do for someone to heal the tissue." He says this understanding has been growing for the last five or ten years, and he's seen evidence of this in his own practice. "Just understanding why they're having pain and why this pain has lasted. Obviously that tissue does not take twenty years to heal, so why are they limping for twenty years?"

He says that's why a vital part of his treatment is education. Stevenson says that patients at North Pole Physical Therapy have forty-five minute sessions, and he'll spend fifteen minutes just talking with his patients, "and it helps people understand better why they're going through what they're going through and how they can psychologically shut that cycle down a little bit."

Stevenson also uses education to benefit local athletes. He'll film an athlete performing various athletic motions--jumping, landing, cutting--and then watch the film with the athlete, analyzing the film in slow motion the athlete's biomechanics. "We are bio-mechanists, in essence, so we know exactly what we're looking for," Stevenson says. "Usually with an athlete it's not so much a strength deficit or a weakness...