How Telehealth and Virtual Physical Therapy Can Help You

Out of nowhere, it seems like everything we do now is online. Workouts, socializing, medicine, almost anything else you can think of is through a Zoom, Skype or FaceTime call. While at first it might have been easy to think it was only going to be a couple of weeks that we were going to be teleworking and telehealthing, it’s now pretty obvious our original guesses on how long this would last were off. If you originally thought you could take a couple week break from working out and taking care of your health, now's the time to start getting back on track. You probably have already started getting in some home workouts or going on runs. It’s also time to take care of your health again. It might be hard to imagine that physical therapy can be effective over a video call so we want to explain why it’s important to take care of your health now, how it works and how it might be able to help you.

What can virtual physical therapy help?

The short answer here is, a lot. Neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, knee pain, running injuries are all very effectively treated virtually. These are all conditions that respond well to exercise and movement and virtual physical therapy sessions allow us to find the right plan for you.

How virtual physical therapy works

Virtual physical therapy can accomplish almost everything that a regular physical therapy session can. We always start with a conversation. This allows us to find out where your pain is, how it started, what makes it better, worse, etc. Based on what we find out in that conversation, we’re able to put you through different movements that tell us about your strength, range of motion and other important information. At this point, we’ll be able to give you a diagnosis for your pain. More importantly, we’ll be able to give you exercises to start getting you back to pain-free running, home workouts, or sitting at your desk, or whatever else it is you want to work on. Following that first session we’ll be able to do weekly check-ins on your progress and to continue giving you different exercises to keep up your progress.

Should I just wait until I can come in person?

For most aches and pains, we’d highly recommend starting to address it now. For one, we don’t know how long we’ll all be waiting to return to normal. It could be a couple of months until health care facilities start operating normally again. If there’s a solution to your pain now, why not start now instead of waiting and living in pain for two months? In addition, dealing with your pain now can help you long term. If you address your nagging neck, back, shoulder pain now, you’ll be able to return to your regular workouts faster when your gym opens again. If you wait too long, then you’ll be limited when you start your regular workouts again. As with a lot of things right now, there are times when you might too busy to prioritize your health. But, now there is an opportunity to be able to take care of your health without ever leaving your home.

What if virtual sessions can’t help me?

There’s always a small percentage of issues that virtual medicine can’t immediately help. That’s why we offer free 15 minute consults. This lets us be sure that it’s something we can definitely help you with virtually. If it’s not something we can help you with, we might be able to point you in the right direction or at least give you advice to start taking control of your issue.

We hope this helps clear up how virtual physical therapy works and how it can help you while you’re stuck at home.