What is Manual Physical Therapy?

Most people think of it just as massage - it’s much more than that. 

Manual Physical Therapy is not a treatment - it’s an approach to how to care for patients that is ultimately results driven.

The approach teaches you to first listen to the patient - where do they hurt?  What are they having difficulty doing?

Next, you analyze their functional movements - walking, standing, running, lifting, reaching, sport movements.  Does it hurt?  Why?  Is something too stiff or is another part of their body not doing its job?  The functional movement assessment often clues the manual physical therapist into a particular body part to focus treatment on which may be the source of the problem.

Then, we get into specific assessment of the site of the pain and other body parts that may be the source of the pain.  Is there adequate mobility there?  Is there adequate muscle activation?  Strength?  Endurance?  Manual Physical Therapists assess utilizing a combination of art and science to get to the root cause of symptoms and lack of function.

Once we’re clear on the site of pain and the source of the pain, we get into treatment.  We often utilize a hands on approach to the soft tissues and joints to improve circulation, improve mobility, and down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system.  This combination often pairs well to get patients feeling better faster than traditional exercise based Physical Therapy.

We’ll then follow up soft tissue and joint work with manual muscle facilitation - this involves asking patients to resist against the therapist in several positions to improve mind-muscle connection to muscles that may not be doing their job on a regular basis.  This pairs well into specific exercise instruction to provide support to certain areas of our body.  It's like putting air in your tires - it protects the wheels. 

Then, we retest their functional movement - what feels different?  Our goal every session is to make an impact.  Patients should often leave feeling better than when they walked in.  If they feel better, this clues us into an area of their body that if we focused on that it should dramatically improve their function.

Last, we educate.  We educate on the problem, what we can do to fix it, how long it could take, and determine a game plan together that compliments the patients life and doesn’t complicate it.  It has been our experience that this approach to care helps patients who haven't seen results with traditional Physical Therapy to reach their goals and feel like themselves again.