In previous blog posts, we have described the clinical and financial benefits of seeing a Physical Therapist first for treatment of neck or low back pain. Patients who choose Physical Therapy first experience accelerated recoveries with decreased pain and recurrence rates compared to other providers. In addition to the clinical benefits, this patient group is...
In any profession, utilized interventions and methods change with incoming ideas and evidence. New concepts and treatments often advance ahead of clinical research trials aiming to support or refute their utilization. Within Physical Therapy, pain neuroscience education has become a popular topic of late. Education topics regarding the development and chronicity of persistent pain are...
Concussions have received significant media and medical research attention over the last decade due to in part to the incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) among former football athletes. This increase in attention to brain injuries has led to improved medical training and early recognition of concussion symptoms leading to improved care of athletes and...
Headaches are a common source of pain and disability with total costs estimated over 30 billion dollars per year. Patients’ signs and symptoms help classify headaches into categories including migraine, tension type, cluster, and cervicogenic but some are found to be multifactorial in nature. Some of the most effective interventions for headache are provided by...
Low back pain is a common condition best treated by Physical Therapists due to their unique ability to effectively provide all evidence based treatments (including spinal manipulation, directional exercise, and strength training) for this patient population. Large systematic reviews of the existing medical literature have repeatedly shown the benefits of strength training to reduce the...
The wait and see approach is often utilized by primary care physicians in the management of musculoskeletal conditions. The underlying idea behind this approach is the improvement of symptoms over time, natural history, of these conditions. The error in this treatment method is the patient has already tried the wait and see approach, and a...
Headaches can be driven by a variety of sources and often are multifactorial in nature. Common headache types treated by our Physical Therapists in our Boulder and Lafayette offices include tension, migraine, and cervicogenic headache. This final type of headache is driven from the joints and musculature of the neck as it meets the base...
The vast majority of musculoskeletal conditions and diagnoses are not life threatening or time sensitive and allow for conservative treatments, including Physical Therapy, to be utilized prior to surgery. In our Boulder Physical Therapy practice we commonly see outcomes consistent with the current research on the utilization of Physical Therapy instead of surgery for common...
Dry needling is a common treatment intervention utilized in our Boulder Physical Therapy and Lafayette Physical Therapy offices. Evidence supports its utilization of dry needling treatment of myofascial pain (muscular) which can be the sole or contributing source of a patient’s current symptoms. A common, mild side effect of the treatment is post needling soreness...
Sacroiliac (SI) joint pain is less common than general low back pain, but it shows up more often in specific groups: pregnant and postpartum patients, and anyone recovering from a fall or direct trauma to the pelvis. It’s also one of the harder diagnoses to pin down, which is part of why treatment approaches vary...
