As a physiotherapist, I want to take care of you: I want you to feel better, move better, and function better. With every new patient that comes in to see me, I'm motivated and determined to get them 100% better. I'm privileged to play such an important role in your health. As such, physiotherapy treatments should be educating, motivating, empowering, and collaborative. I understand that treatments can be frustrating at times as it can be painful, and you may feel worse coming out of it than going into it. In addition to that, changes may be slow to notice. I get it. Sometimes, however, I find that the greatest barrier to recovery is you. Yes, you, the patient.
Just like people who are looking for good hairdressers, or good mechanics, or good doctors, we're also looking for good patients. How good of a patient are you? How realistic are your goals? What kind of expectations do you have? What's your attitude towards recovery? How committed are you? How compliant are you?
Unfortunately, there's no magic pill that you can take to make all your problems go away. Physiotherapists cannot wave a magic wand and take your pain away. There are a lot of assets that we can offer to help you manage your symptoms until we resolve your condition; however, it takes time. Healing is a process: there are no shortcuts, and it does not happen overnight. Your injury certainly did not develop overnight. In this case, being a good patient means understanding that your physiotherapist cannot rescue you from your condition. Instead, we equip you with all the necessary strategies and management techniques in order for you to get some symptom relief. As hard as it sounds, you have to be patient and give your physiotherapist the time that they need to deal with your issues. Based on the stages of healing, recovery usually takes between 6 to 8 weeks for most injuries (obviously, this is affected by many factors, such as age, co-morbidities, extent of injury, etc.). We can help you decrease your symptoms and improve your mobility during this period, but there is no potion that we can feed you to bring the recovery time down to say, 2 weeks. We're not miracle workers, and time is just something we cannot fight against. Therefore, it's not fair for you to go for one or two physio treatments and say that physio does not work. There's nothing more frustrating for us, as practitioners, to have patients that expect instantaneous results. You need to give everything a chance for it to work.
Human bodies are designed to move on a regular basis, and most people just don't move enough (or else they don't move properly). The painful condition that you experience may have come out of the blue, but it's usually the end result of chronic dysfunctions that have been built up over time in the body. Physiotherapists use rehabilitative and corrective exercises to fix the underlying causes of your problems. Being a good patient means doing the exercises! If you think about it, you go to physio an average of maybe twice a week for half an hour or so. What are you doing during the other 167 hours of the week? Do you go back to the same positions, postures, and activities that probably caused your pain in the first place? Most likely. There's only so much that we can do for you during our treatments; the rest is up to you. We can help you feel looser and gain better movement during your treatments, but if you don't maintain it, we're starting from scratch every time you come in. My goal is not to see you forever.
Your beliefs and attitudes play an important role in recovery. Pain does not relate directly to the amount of tissue damage. Rather, your brain interprets the level of threat it's under based on your emotions, understanding, thoughts, beliefs, previous experiences, etc. Pain is less severe when you feel that you're safe. Therefore, a positive and trusting relationship with your physiotherapist is important for success. To be a good patient, you should be honest, you should share your previous experiences, you should give feedback, you should ask questions, and you should keep an open line of communication with your treating practitioner. The more you know about your condition, and the more you participate in your therapy, the better your chances of recovery. We can't read minds, and we don't know what you're thinking or how you're feeling. The more details you give us, the more information we have to work with. However, good communication is a two-way street, and it means also listening to your physiotherapist's advice and recommendations. When we say that we want to see you twice a week, we want to see you twice a week: not once every two weeks, not only when you have the day off, not whenever you feel like booking in, not when your benefits renew again. I understand that other things come up: work, kids, life, etc., but we recommend a specific treatment plan for a reason. The success of your health would be so much more improved if both parties are fully engaged and interested in the outcome.
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