Desert Springs Physical Therapy - Silver City, NM

The best way to take care of your health is to take an active role in your own health care. To do this, you need to know about your options and your rights as a patient. Patients across the country are becoming better educated and demanding more and better options from their health insurance companies. The right to physical therapist services is an important option, and it is your right as a patient.

Federally qualified HMOs are required to have physical therapy in their benefits packages.

Why Physical Therapy?

• Physical therapists are experts in how the musculoskeletal and neuromuscular systems function.
• Physical therapist services are cost-effective. Early physical therapy intervention prevents more costly treatment later, can result in a faster recovery, and reduces costs associated with lost time from work.
• Patients pay less when they have direct access to physical therapy services. However, there can be a temptation under managed care to terminate services prematurely. A study conducted to determine whether direct access to physical therapy services was cost-effective found that patients who went directly to a physical therapist had fewer episodes of care, and services were ultimately less costly.

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Physical therapists are professional health care providers who are licensed by the state in which they practice. You can check with your state agency overseeing physical therapy licensure to make sure that your physical therapist is licensed and in good standing. You can also contact the state Physical Therapy Chapter.

Specialization

Many physical therapists specialize in treating specific areas of the body, such as the back, neck, knee, hand, or shoulder, or they may concentrate their practice on pre- and postnatal care, sports injuries, stroke rehabilitation, or one of many other areas or physical therapy. Physical therapists may also be certified by the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties (ABPTS) in seven specialty areas of physical therapy: orthopedics, sports, geriatrics, pediatrics, cardiopulmonary, neurology, and clinical electrophysiology.

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FOR years, people with worn-out knees were told to wait as long as possible before opting for replacement. Wait until you are older, the thinking went, so the joint will outlive you.

But medical experts say doctors and patients are pushing the limits of their old joints too far. Improvements in artificial joint technology and surgical techniques mean replacements are lasting longer than ever — often 20 years or more. But doctors are still advising candidates for replacement to “wait until you can’t stand it.” As a result, some patients wait until the cartilage in their knees wears out completely, leaving them housebound and with painful bone-on-bone rubbing in their knees.

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Exercises that build strength and flexibility can help minimize the debilitating spills that come from advanced age.

THOUGH THE wisdom that comes with age can help navigate metaphorical bumps in the road of life, actual, physical obstacles can cause stumbles and falls. Increasingly, to combat a natural loss of balance that comes with the passing years, many people are turning to balance training classes.

About one-third of Americans age 65 and older fall each year – roughly 12 million people. Falls are the leading cause of injury deaths and the most common cause of nonfatal injuries and hospital admissions for trauma in senior citizens.

More than 90% of the 352,000 hip fractures that occur each year are the result of falls, and such fractures can be catastrophic. According to government statistics, only one-quarter of such patients make a full recovery, 40% will require at least temporary nursing home care, and 24% of hip fracture patients over the age of 50 die within 12 months.

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It was near the end of ” Sex and the City,” after the starlets had worn high heels in the snow, at the pool, to the beach, in the rain (is this sounding like Dr. Seuss?) and, of course, to bed. It was after the one who got pregnant went jogging and we were not allowed to see what she was wearing on her feet, and after the only visible shoes I remember spotting other than high heels had made their appearance (flats worn by an office intern and sneakers worn by two guys throwing rose petals during a photo shoot).

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Using infrared cameras and other devices, the researchers assessed how 12 subjects with a recent knee replacement and 12 controls went from a seated to a standing position. Participants were tested at three months after surgery, and one year after surgery.

Even after a year, knee patients bent forward significantly more than the control group, says senior author Lynn Snyder-Mackler, professor of physical therapy at the University of Delaware. The motion is kind to the knee but places added strain on the hip and on the opposite leg. “One of the things that happens after total knee or total hip” surgery, says Snyder-Mackler, “is that you end up with problems on the other side, both the hip and the knee.” One solution, she says, is for the patient to work with his or her physical therapist on a sitting-to-standing motion that is not bent as far forward.

The study appeared last month in the journal Physical Therapy.

Tiger Woods will be conspicuous in his absence from this week’s field and from the remainder of this season’s PGA Tour schedule, but Woods’s health issues have substantiated an often snidely dismissed truth: Swinging a golf club can be dangerous.

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