by Peter Culp
Something I will usually say during a new patient evaluation is that I want them to discharge from physical therapy as quickly and safely as possible. 1. I do not want to take any more insurance or financial resources than is necessary. 2. I do not want patients to rely on physical therapy indefinitely for improving their impairments. As a physical therapist, my ultimate goal is to empower patients by giving them tools they need to help sustain a good level of health and wellness once they are no longer attending physical therapy appointments. One of the most powerful tools to maintain results is a solid home exercise program. Done properly, these programs help patients achieve and maintain an ideal level of health and wellness.
If you’ve previously had physical therapy, you were likely given a home exercise program to perform between therapy appointments. Exercises during a physical therapy case can be prescribed by a therapist for a number of different reasons. In some instances, exercises are meant to help coordinate muscles or improve vascularity or blood flow in the muscles. This helps with function or to heal damaged tissue. In other cases, it can be to build strength and power if someone is experiencing weakness, or even help improve range of motion if a patient has limitations in their motion.
Exercise programs have a purpose behind them.
Each patient is unique with impairments or limitations that are specific to them. The same is true for the home exercise programs that are thoughtfully designed and tailored to each individual patient. The overall purpose of maintaining a home exercise program is to increase speed of recovery and give patients the guided practice needed to be self-sustaining after therapy ends. This helps to ensure that impairments are not likely to return.
Our goal at Advance Therapy is to create a culture of patient responsibility. We do this by empowering our patients by way of education, to show them how they can be in charge of maintaining their positive therapy results long after they leave our clinic.
Our ideal patients, and those with the best success rates and optimal outcomes, are the ones who take the bull by the horns, so to speak, do their home exercises, recognizing that they play the most important role in their own recovery.
With the majority of patients (65%) not doing their home exercises, we recognize that one of our biggest roles we play as physical therapists is to keep educating, encouraging, and being a source of accountability for the ultimate success of our patients.