At Rebound, we help our patients recover faster from injuries, illnesses, and surgeries with customized physical therapy programs. Most people aren’t familiar with the uses of physical therapy to accelerate the healing of your soft tissues or your joints. But this is an incredible benefit of physical therapy that I want to tell you more about today.
How Early Intervention of Physical Therapy Can Speed Up Healing
When you have an injury, surgery, or illness that requires PT to handle, it’s important to see a physical therapist early to help guide you through the healing and recovery process. This is because physical therapy addresses the three major phases of soft tissue healing:
- The inflammatory phase
- The repair phase
- The remodeling phase
You do different activities in each one of those phases to
The Inflammatory Phase
The first one, the inflammatory phase, is your body’s immediate response to a soft tissue injury. And physical therapists are good at reducing inflammation and swelling, during that acute stage, when things are inflamed.
The Repair Phase
Let’s say you have an ankle sprain, and you get some bleeding and swelling into the area. That’s good because it brings new cells and new nutrients to the area for the joint to heal. That’s the second phase, the repair phase, where you’re building and rebuilding the integrity of those structures in your ankle. When that’s happening, physical therapy can help organize that process and in fact makes a huge difference to your recovery.
We want to address the injury in an organized fashion to restore the integrity of the tissues in the joint (in this example, an ankle) to keep you active and safe. We know how those tissues heal and how to optimize your healing to accelerate it.
The Remodeling Phase
Then the third stage, which is the remodeling stage or the rebuilding stage. This is where we can strengthen and stabilize those structures and those tissues in your ankle (or any body part) for long-term health.
Physical Therapists Can Help You Heal Rapidly
I tell people that PTs are like the tour guide. The body does what it does in each one of the three phases. We guide you through those phases to optimize and accelerate the healing process, because we know what the tissues do, we know what the joints do, we know what kind of good nutrients that need to be brought to the area. In the case of an ankle sprain, we’d first get the swelling down quickly, stabilize the joint, and get you moving through your therapy rapidly to return back to your normal daily activities. But this is all done on a very gradient scale so that we aren’t overstressing the tissue, creating more inflammation and worsening the problem.
Then in the long-term, you want a home program and/or progression of your activities in the later stages, after your first six weeks of healing. This is when you’re getting into that rebuilding phase to restore the overall long-term integrity of the tissues and structures in your joints. That helps you rebuild your function. Progression of function is the key.
Call Rebound for Faster Healing
When you have an injury, don’t wait. It costs you more to wait, and it’ll take you longer to heal without having a physical therapist to guide you. We’re trained in getting you through that restoration and rehabilitation process to get you back in action. If you need help recovering from an injury, illness, or surgery, call Rebound at (785) 367-3082. We can accelerate the healing process through all three phases, and we’d love to help you.
