I get so many patients that have either come into my office after a month of rest and are frustrated that they still hurt. Or they reach out to me to get my opinion on what is going on, and are then told by their doctor that they need to just take some medication and rest or just rest for the next month.
Why does it not work most of the time?
Most of the people who come into my office have no clue what they did to hurt themselves. Lets just start here with this scenario. If you have been hurting for longer than 2 weeks it probably is not going to go away by doing nothing. We need to get down to what is going on and what you are doing to compensate for this problem. I often find they have had off and on issues for a while. The compensation from your activities finally caught up with them and until you can get to the source of what you are doing, rest will do nothing.
You might feel better because you are no longer doing the activity that is giving you problems, but once you go back to running, or lifting weights, or doing yoga, or pilates, or what ever it is you want to do, you will go back to the same pattern and the pain will return again. Yes, it is so frustrating that you wasted a whole month to figure out that it did not work. I have seen this time and time again.
Lets look at a second scenario.
You did injure yourself from a fall or something specific you did. Now if you have a fracture then yes, you need to allow the bone to have enough time to heal before you start to load the structure with exercises. Now with other injuries such as ankle sprains, or strains of muscles or knee and back injuries, etc; you may need to rest for a short period of time, but getting the body to move within boundaries also helps with healing and you will progress at a much faster rate. It is why after knee surgeries such as total knee replacement, they get people up and moving ASAP. They don’t let them rest for a month. They have found through research that patients do much better when getting them moving right after surgeries.
Then why would we want to rest for 1 month and do nothing when we have pain? I do not have an answer to that.
When progressing from and injury you that you specifically know what you did, you need to listen to the body, start slow and see how the body responds and gradually work on progressing the load to get the tissue ready for whatever goals you want to get back to. Working with someone who specializes in a thorough evaluation process to understand how to progress you will help you tremendously. It will take less time to get back to what you love to do. Sometimes you can still be active and you just need to modify your activity.
If you are looking for someone who can help you get back to your sport or doing what you love, just give us a call. At mPower Physical Therapy in Dallas, we will have a conversation and do a FREE Discovery visit to see if we are a good fit for you or not. We want you to be comfortable to with your decision to come to us.
If you or you know someone who would like to set something like that up with our office, just CLICK HERE and we will have one of our client care specialist give you a call to set you up with one of our Physical Therapist at our Dallas office.
