Five ways to get the most out of your physiotherapy appointment
At Pivotal Motion Physiotherapy, we have a good split of frequent flyer patients as well as new patients. As always, we want to ensure we provide top service and for those that haven’t been to physios before or those who don’t go often, we have provided a list of things to do to ensure that you get the most of your physiotherapy appointment and leave satisfied. 
1. Ask your physio anything or everything.
We encourage our patients to leave with no questions unanswered regarding your injury. We understand that injuries can be confusing especially when sometimes you experience pain in one area of the body but it is actually coming from another source (referred pain). We want to stress that THIS is WHY you see us – so you leave with a clear understanding of your injury and what to expect with recovery. This can hopefully leave you feeling reassured and confident.
2. Trust your Physiotherapist!
This can be easier said than done. There are concepts in physiotherapy that are sometimes a bit weird to grasp. An example of this is trigger point releasing – where you must cause pain to reduce pain! This is when we respectfully ask our clients to put trust in our training, experience and ability. Our physiotherapists are highly trained, and rest assured that the treatment plan they implement have sound clinical reasoning.
3. Expect that there may be post treatment pain.
Post treatment pain is a phenomenon frequently experienced after physiotherapy treatment. This is achy pain or soreness from manual therapy and should only last for a couple of hours and up to early the following day after treatment at most. After this, there should be marked improvement. In line with trusting your physio, we also ask our clients to understand this concept and that it is ok to be in some temporary pain after treatment. However, if ever you are concerned that the pain is more than this, we recommend our clients to call and speak to our physiotherapists.
4. Do your homework.
Our clinic philosophy is that recovery is 20% of what we do in the clinic and 80% of what our clients do for self-management. We’d like to remind our patients that they only see us half an hour at a time so we highly recommend our patients to do their home exercises. These exercises are designed for rehabilitation so that our patients get better in a timely manner. More importantly, these exercises can be done for the prevention of future injuries. Recovery is always an active process!
5. Follow up with your physiotherapist.
The mistake some patients make is they don’t follow up with their physiotherapist. The last thing we want is for clients to return unsatisfied with their recovery when they haven’t followed up with their physiotherapist to ensure they fully recover. To prevent this is very simple: follow up with your physio until they are satisfied that you have fully recovered or have got a solid grasp of self management. Follow up appointments are designed to progress patients with their exercise programmes, do more manual therapy if required and most importantly, to ensure that patients are still on the right road to recovery.
To make an appointment with one of our physios here at Pivotal Motion, book online today or call us on 07 3352 5116.
