INJURIES: Recovering from an injury is like having construction done on your house

Recovering from an injury is like hiring a contractor to put an addition on your house. During construction, there are many things to consider, each day there are a new set of things that need to be considered, such as:  picking out hardware, molding, tile, style of doors, paint colors, the list goes on and on.  Recently it hit me:  that’s what rehabbing an injuring feels like.  Construction as a metaphor for Rehab – The details that you must pay attention to can be tedious and time consuming.  The process seems to move at a snail’s pace.

Here are some tips for understanding and helping you to get through the physical Rehab process.

RECOGNIZING YOU HAVE A PHYSICAL ISSUE

1. When you feel something believe it. Pain is the indicator.  It’s your bodies way of letting you know something is wrong.  Don’t assume “it will go away on its own”.  Continuing your activity level will only lead to more of a problem.  If the pain or stiffness is gradually better each day and you are feeling fine after two days than you issue is a minor one.  If you resume your usual activity level and the pain returns, then you are doing something to irritate the area of discomfort and or you have more than a minor problem.

WHAT TO DO?

2. After seeing your Physician for a diagnosis.  Ask what medical treatments will benefit your injury:  Physical Therapy, Chiropractic, Massage Therapy, Acupuncture…  Try to get your physician to commit to more than one mode of treatment because you may find that one is not enough, to resolve your issue.  Most often the starting point is Physical Therapy, but the other modalities listed can be an added benefit to having your rehab progress more quickly, depending on your diagnosis.

3. Do your research when picking a medical rehab practitioner. Ask family, friends, research on the web for someone who specializes in your injury or someone who has helped a friend you know.  Working with someone who has had experience with your injury gives you an advantage of having a very knowledgeable therapist.

4. Once you start therapy, work hard and follow instructions from the therapist. Don’t expect therapy to be fun or the cure to your issue.  The reason rehab is not fun is because rehab is most effective when done in increments.  Once your body can pass certain level of exercise, you will advance with more challenging therapy, but you must do your “homework”. Exercises as directed by the therapist.  When you feel certain exercises are becoming easy don’t take the initiative to increase the reps of the exercises without the approval of the therapist.  Remember:  More is not necessarily better, sometimes less is more.

5. Be a Patient with Patience. If you are told that your injury will take six weeks’ plan on 12 weeks.  Soft tissue injuries, do not heel as quickly as broken bones.  You may also find that even after 12 weeks at times you will experience a twinge here or there when reestablishing your regular workout or sport.  Maintain your rehab exercises well after discharge from therapy.  Those annoying exercises specifically activate the injured tissue that you now want to function at a higher level of activity.  Use them as a warm up to the activity that you love.

SIMPLE EXPLANATION AS TO WHY INJURIES TAKE TIME TO HEAL

6. To simplify, when muscles are injured they essentially lose their ability to function normally. Rehabilitation is a retraining/reeducation process for the tissue.  Muscle contraction for the most part is an unconscious action, it originates in the spinal column, it is not a brain process like calculating a math problem.  When you eat food, you don’t need to think about how many degrees to rotate your wrist to get food in your mouth, you just do it.  When you have injured muscle fibers you must stimulate/retrain the injured muscle fibers for them to be able to release and contract as they did prior to the injury. In order to retrain a muscle, you must “think”/concentrate on the repetitive actions/exercises provided by the therapist.  This takes effort and repetition, it is a painstaking process.  Many people find physical therapy to be quite boring and ineffective, the reason for this is because we are not naturally designed to have to think of our motor skills.  If we had been designed to think of how and at what angle, we needed to move each muscle we would never get anything else done.  Hence, there would be no such thing as multitasking……:-)!

7. Why do people struggle so much with Physical Therapy when injured? I believe, it is mainly because they don’t understand that P.T. Exercises are essential to getting muscles to function normally again and patients don’t often “feel” the benefit because the process is a slow one and healing takes time.  When people don’t recognize the benefit they often either don’t do the exercises or stop the rehab before it has a noticeable benefit.  This usually leads to patients assuming they will never get better and “they will have to live with the pain/injury”.

8. Rehabbing an injury requires blind faith. Patients need to work at it even though they don’t want to.  The human body is not naturally designed to methodically do repetitive exercises, we are designed to be either; running away from something or running towards something, not repeating the same movements over and over.  Therefore, many patients have an internal eversion to doing rehab exercise.

TIPS TO HELP YOU GET THROUGH REHAB

When in rehab, ask questions, such as:  “Why am I doing this exercise”?  “What benefit should I expect”?  What is this exercise doing for my muscle or joint injury”?  Remember if you are told to do 3 sets of 5 of an exercise per day.  Do NOT do 20 sets of 5 each day; thinking the more you do the quicker you will recover.  Not true, you will most likely over use the muscles or joints and prolong your injury.

The people that succeed with rehab are usually the ones that, “JUST DO IT”.  I find that if you leave the emotional aversion to rehab at the door you will succeed.  Implementing a consistent routine of going to therapy and doing exercises for a period of 14 days usually gets you over the natural internal emotional resistance and you will experience progress.  Your lack of movement will increase and your pain will decrease.

If you are struggling with P.T./chiropractic care therapeutic massage can give you the relief from discomfort in a noticeable way.  Releasing the tension, stiffness in injured tissue and in compensating muscles that are baring the load of your injury; will help with the healing of the tissue and give you physical relief from discomfort.

Remember movement is a main purpose of life and non-movement is when rigor mortis sets in. :-)!  The less you do for your injury the more pain and lack of use you will have.