IS YOUR PHYSICAL THERAPIST TAKING YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO?

You did it!  You realized you needed some help, took the plunge, and found a physical therapist that you want to work with.  Hopefully you were able to ask questions about that particular therapist to make sure they were a good fit for you.  After all, therapy isn’t something you do but something you experience.  

But how do you know if things are going the way they should?  Well, we at Headquarters Physical Therapy believe that the most important things we can discuss with our patients is their goals.  

Here are some tips to help you set effective goals with your therapist.

1. Goals should be relevant to your lifestyle.  

It’s important to be clear about what you hope to be able to do after your course of rehab.  If you are a competitive marathon runner and you are having knee pain with running, your long and short term goals should be applicable to running and your therapist should be able to communicate with you how this is going to lead to that.

2. Goals should have objective markers.

It’s important to “feel better” and likely helpful to “have less pain”.  But what do those things mean? Feel better when? While doing what activity?  Better how? Want less pain? If you have pain after 30 minutes of a particular activity would you be ok with being able to do 45 or 60 minutes of that activity before the onset of pain?  How long should we wait before we assess whether our approach is working? A few weeks? A few months? It’s important to have time frames to help establish healthy expectations of your course of rehab.  

Breaking down a long-term goal into micro goals are also a helpful way to assess progress while minimizing discouragement.  It’s easy to get discouraged that you still haven’t lost all 20 pounds but if you notice a couple pounds of weight loss every other week then you can rest assured you are moving in the right direction. 

3. Goals should be realistic.

Try as you may, a sub 2-hour marathon is probably out of the cards.  And if you are 5’8” with a 12 inch vertical then as good as your physical therapist is they are likely not going to get you to dunk a basketball on a regulation hoop.  

But if you are an all-star soccer player that just had ACL reconstruction surgery then being ready to try out for the varsity team within 12 months doesn’t seem so far-fetched of an idea (notice the relevancy and the objective marker of a time frame in that goal?).

A very important takeaway from all of this is that you, as a patient, should not feel timid about providing too much information.  Often times patients will admit to withholding information about themselves in fear that the therapist finds the information to be irrelevant.  This is a sad side effect of a typical healthcare system that has rushed patients in and out from in front of providers as a way to increase profit from volume of patients seen.  

This is where we are different.  We would prefer our patients to spill MORE information than they think is necessary.  We want to know as much about you as possible so we know how best to treat you. After all, you are more than your injury.  

If you are still unsure of how we can help or want some more information about our approach don’t hesitate to click “speak with a doctor” and we will reach out to you!