The well-known benefits of physical therapy like helping you overcome pain, restore mobility, and accelerate recovery from an injury or surgery are reason enough to choose this type of treatment to support your health.

But the specialists at Prolete Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine know that physical therapy can do more than most people realize and deliver benefits patients didn’t expect. Let’s explore five of the surprising benefits of physical therapy.

Safely managing chronic pain

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends non-pharmaceutical options such as physical therapy as the first line of treatment for chronic pain.

Rather than relying on a drug to temporarily alter your perception of pain, you can engage in a personalized physical therapy regimen that helps you achieve long-lasting pain relief by improving your body and healing the source of your pain.

Exercise boosts circulation, delivering more oxygen, nutrients, and healing agents while eliminating more waste. Exercise and manual therapies like manipulation and massage trigger the release of your body’s natural pain-killing endorphins, while improving your strength and range of motion.

Treating vestibular disorders and restoring balance

If you’re diagnosed with a vestibular disorder, you may experience problems like loss of balance, dizziness, and vertigo. Most people faced with this type of health challenge don’t realize that physical therapy can help restore their balance.

We use many vestibular rehabilitation techniques to improve your health, including:

• Balance training
• Strength training
• Gaze stabilization
• Habituation exercises
• Proprioceptive training
• Visual tracking exercises
• Gait training

Vestibular rehabilitation is a specialized exercise program that trains your brain to overcome the inner ear problems responsible for your symptoms. As a result, physical therapy reduces symptoms such as dizziness, improves your balance, and significantly lowers your risk of falling.

Providing sport-specific rehabilitation and training

Though physical therapy is an integral part of treatment following a sports injury, patients are often surprised to learn that they can receive sport-specific rehabilitation.

While we provide all the typical therapies needed for recovering from an injury, we also know that your physical needs are different when your goal is to return to competitive sports.

Each sport places different demands on your body. We focus on the mechanics and forces of your specific sport, retraining your body so you can return to play with better performance than before your injury.

Here’s another surprise benefit: You don’t need to wait for an injury to occur before seeking sport-specific training. We can evaluate your body mechanics, identify imbalances, and develop a training program that helps you prevent injuries.

Improving movement problems due to neurological disorders

Physical therapy offers one-on-one treatment that helps patients with neurological disorders improve their gait, decrease spasticity, and regain muscle strength lost due to inactivity. We also restore your cardiovascular health, motor skills, posture, balance, and upper limb function.

With the ongoing support of physical therapy, people with movement disorders can regain mobility, improve their quality of life, and maintain optimal independence.

Enriching your overall health

The goal of physical therapy is to restore movement. We use many therapeutic techniques to help people, whether they’re recovering from surgery or an orthopedic injury, have arthritis, or struggle with a neurological disorder.

Of all the different modalities used in physical therapy, exercise is the heart of treatment because it restores strength, flexibility, and movement.

And as physical therapy allows you to move again, exercise improves your health by:

• Boosting your brain health
• Reducing anxiety
• Lifting your mood
• Improving your sleep
• Helping you lose weight
• Strengthening your bones
• Lowering your risk for chronic health conditions

Physical therapy is more than a medical treatment. It supports your ability to stay active and enjoy life.

If you have any questions about physical therapy or would like to schedule an appointment, call our office in Milford, Connecticut, or use online booking today.