treatment Archives - Smith Performance Center

7 Key Reasons Why the Home Plan Is Vital for Success in Physical Therapy

Craig Smith November 17, 2023

The significance of the home plan often gets overshadowed by in-session treatment. At Smith Performance Center, our physical therapy sessions are one hour per week with your therapist. You are responsible for the other 167 hours. Due to this, the home plan is a vital component of your physical therapy journey, capable of either propelling your progress or impeding it. It’s not uncommon for our team to encounter new clients who’ve stuck to the same ineffective home plan for years, making errors like stretching an irritated nerve, overloading painful joints, or handling an extensive plan that goes largely undone. These missteps tend to patients undervaluing the home plan. However, the home plan stands as a linchpin for your success. We want to explain the 7 key reasons why the home plan is vital for success in physical therapy. Ensuring We Target the Right Problem There are instances where immediate relief

5 Reasons You May Struggle To Get A Diagnosis And The Right Treatment At Physical Therapy

Craig Smith November 16, 2023

Upon your arrival at Smith Performance Center, our primary goal is to comprehensively understand the source of your pain or symptoms. Our physical therapists initiate this by gathering crucial information through a medical history form, conducting detailed interviews about your experiences, performing thorough examinations, creating an initial list of potential diagnoses, validating our hypotheses through treatment, and finally, devising an initial home plan. This phase in our rehabilitation process is aptly termed ‘Diagnosis and Home Plan Development’. While not creatively titled, it accurately encapsulates the process our team undertakes. A concrete diagnosis is pivotal for us to confidently provide effective assistance. However, arriving at a diagnosis can be challenging due to various reasons. These complexities range from the diverse causes of pain (such as injury, inflammation, nerve-related issues, sensitization, psychogenic factors, and dysfunctional conditions) to individual-specific challenges. Some individuals struggle to articulate their experiences effectively, while others may not exhibit

Total Knee Case Study: Why You Need A Structured Rehab Process

Craig Smith September 29, 2023

A structured rehab process that ultimately targets a full return to activity is missing in healthcare. Patients struggling with pain are treated as if they are all the same. We believe there are common, big problems to address, but there is a high degree of uncertainty with every patient presentation. Even when a patient has the same diagnosis they can have different triggers, different contributing factors, different behaviors, and drastically different needs in the rehab process. This is true when patients have the same surgery by the same surgeon. Let me use an example with a straightforward rehab plan; post-total knee replacement. The Painful Total Knee Replacement Peter Pain had a total knee replacement. He has always been active and handles pain well but this replacement has been horrible. First, he fell behind on medication post-surgery because he hated the way the drugs made his stomach feel. The second day

What are the 3 major issues in physical therapy and exercise?

Craig Smith September 25, 2023

The quality of physical therapy is not consistent between clinicians or clinics. There are numerous reasons causing the differences: the overall rehab process, the management, how the client pays for the service (insurance, Medicare, cash, etc.), the time available between the clinician and patient, the use of assistants, the number of patients per provider during an hour, the clinical skill set, and training of a specific physical therapist. This is far from an exhaustive list. These issues result in a pervasive underperformance in rehab outcomes for clients. The 3 major issues in physical therapy and rehab When starting out on a rehab journey, you will not think about these problems – you just want to feel better. But these issues matter and directly impact your outcome. The major issues in physical therapy fall into 3 critical areas: Process, Patient-Provider Relationship, and Clinical Skill. Together, these drive the difference in experience

The 5 Components of Invisible Triggers That Cause Your Rehab Progress to Stall

Craig Smith June 14, 2023

You keep getting close to feeling good but then fall back into an injury because of a common, but often unrecognized issue – invisible triggers. An invisible trigger is an action or activity that does not seem to be causing your injury to worsen but is actually causing your injury to remain and not heal. If you slammed your finger into a door, you would know the door caused your pain. Continuing to slam your finger in the door will cause the finger pain to remain. In contrast, an invisible trigger is not as clear as slamming your finger in a door. Patients have an easier time eliminating obvious triggers. This does not happen with invisible triggers. An example would be low back pain triggered by an interaction between two activities: running followed by a bout of sitting. When we investigate running by itself, there is no problem. We repeat

Four Reasons Why Patient Forms Help Improve Your Care During Your Rehab Process

Craig Smith June 6, 2023

‘Not all relevant outcomes can be assessed with a device, a laboratory test, a physical finding or some other data gathering independent of the patient’s perception and voice.’ -Kroenke, Monahan, and Kean 2016 We want to share with you how filling out patient forms is not only useful to our team but also critical for receiving the best care. In the ranking of where you want to spend your time, completing forms for a medical visit is just above a tooth extraction. The act is mind-numbing. Partially due to the perceived lack of benefit and partially because you know the healthcare provider isn’t using it. They will even ask the same questions that were already answered in the form. Our team would like to change your mind on this by showing how we use your forms to impact your care – the why, how, and when. There are three clear

The 5 Patient Responses That Should Impact Your Physical Therapist’s Strategy

Craig Smith April 5, 2023

In a session, the first rule as a practitioner is to make sure we do not lie to ourselves about what’s happening, and lying to ourselves is the easiest thing to do. We can lie to ourselves when we make errors in reasoning due to a plethora of cognitive pitfalls like confirmation or optimism bias, overconfidence, or mistaken availability heuristics. This can ruin the chances of a great outcome if I only search for facts that confirm my dominant theory, or if I want the patient to have a great response so I ignore portions of the medical history that would lead me to a think of worse prognosis. These cognitive errors ‘help’ me to lie to myself. One solution is to get very clear on what the patient is reporting. There are only 5 patient responses in the session: great, good, bad, terrible, and no response. Certain pathologies readily

Physical Therapy Exercises

Craig Smith September 4, 2020

At Smith Performance Center, physical therapy exercises are used to maximize healing, build resiliency, reduce pain, and correct abnormal motor patterns. We do not use an endless array of exercises that would take an hour or two every day. We understand more than one to two exercises mean compliance, and performance plummets. Our team wanted to put up common exercises we use to help you remember the form. We have it broken up by body part and there is some cross-over, so you may see the same exercise in a few different categories. Let us know if you have any questions. Spine Chin Tuck Exercise Isometric Activation Exercise Self Massage for the Upper Trap Self Massage for Posterior Shoulder Suitcase Carry Upper Extremity T Exercise Y Prone Exercise Serratus Plank Lower Extremity Clamshell Exercise Posterior Tibialis Exercise

What is Telehealth?

Craig Smith March 19, 2020

Telehealth in Physical Therapy The Technical Definition The official definition of telehealth is as follows: “Telehealth is defined as the use of electronic information and telecommunication technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health, and health administration. Technologies include video conferencing, the internet…”. To take the technology further, telehealth is an umbrella term for a variety of services (education, administration, public health, healthcare) delivered electronically through telecommunications. Healthcare services delivered through video conferencing and internet services are called telemedicine. Telemedicine is the term used to describe clinical care rendered through video conferencing, the internet, and other electronic means. Telemedicine is one specific component of telehealth and is the primary service we are putting systems in place to provide. We will use the term telemedicine and telehealth interchangeably on our website and in this article. For our purposes, the distinction is unnecessary. Our

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SPC Archives

Tag: treatment

7 Key Reasons Why the Home Plan Is Vital for Success in Physical Therapy

5 Reasons You May Struggle To Get A Diagnosis And The Right Treatment At Physical Therapy

Total Knee Case Study: Why You Need A Structured Rehab Process

What are the 3 major issues in physical therapy and exercise?

The 5 Components of Invisible Triggers That Cause Your Rehab Progress to Stall

Four Reasons Why Patient Forms Help Improve Your Care During Your Rehab Process

The 5 Patient Responses That Should Impact Your Physical Therapist’s Strategy

Physical Therapy Exercises

What is Telehealth?

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Updates from Smith Performance Center

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