Injuries can come from a wide variety of places, including work, exercise, sports, and intense physical activity. Common injuries can range from lacerations to broken bones, and regardless of severity it will take time to heal.
When healing, one concern that affects many who are injured is how to develop mobility so you can get back into action. Healing properly, combined with methods to regain mobility the right way, can help you come back as strong and flexible as ever.
Patients in the Hagerstown, Maryland area looking for rehabilitation that can help strengthen your mobility are in luck. Dr. Chris Clark and Premier Spine and Sports Medicine offer cutting-edge solutions for getting through injuries and getting back into play.
The importance of physical therapy
Ultimately, the rehabilitation process limits the extent of an injury, reduces loss of function, and works to heal the disability. This can be made harder by the fatigue and weakness you can experience after an injury. Injuries need time to heal, and while you’re healing you need to be able to keep the body in motion as much as it’s safe to do so. Physical therapy in rehabilitation usually starts shortly after treatment for an injury, and is vital to getting you back to full health.
There are some basic steps to consider as a part of getting through physical therapy and regaining your mobility:
1. Avoid aggravating your injury
Healing is a gradual process, so your therapy will need to cater to the speed at which your body heals.
2. Don’t rest too long
Naturally you need to rest an injury to help your body heal, but you can’t sit idle too long. Since therapy usually starts shortly after an injury is treated, the sooner you can start working on mobility, the sooner you can heal properly.
3. Take your therapy seriously
If you don’t follow through on the instructions you’re given by your therapist, recovery is harder and takes longer. Work together to make recovery faster and easier for everyone involved.
4. Expect your therapy to challenge you
To improve over time, your challenges will get harder in order to push your body to work more to recover effectively. Your therapy should never push you to the point of aggravating your injury, but should match your body’s ability to move.
Other methods that help to rebuild mobility
Regenerative medicine is another way to help your body heal. It’s a method of using material from your own body to boost its ability to heal from injury. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections and stem cell therapy use cells from your body to promote healing and support cell growth. This can be used alongside your physical therapy to help you recover faster.
Interventional pain management can also be used to regulate pain problems that may be associated with your injury. This can include nerve block injections, rhizotomy (a procedure that turns off pain signals), and neurostimulation. Helping manage your pain makes it easier to help you restore your mobility.
Recovery from injury is a team process, and Dr. Clark and Premier Spine and Sports Medicine can help. Call our office or book an appointment online today to start your road to recovery.