If you have yet to attend a session, you may be wondering about if it is worth it to attend. Or if you have already attended a session, you may not be seeing progress as quickly as you’d like to. If you have recently suffered an injury, or you are recovering from a surgery, you may have been prescribed physical therapy by your doctor.
However, it is imperative that you begin or continue your physical therapy sessions, as physical therapy can have a huge impact on your recovery. Skipping sessions, or avoiding physical therapy all together can really have a significant effect on your recovery. Here is why avoiding physical therapy can be dangerous:
Worsening Injury
If you have been prescribed physical therapy, and generally a certain number of sessions is recommended by the doctor or physical therapist, it has been prescribed for a reason. Usually the reason is to improve the healing of an injury. If you have been injured, and are skipping physical therapy sessions, there is the potential for the injury to worsen.
For example, physical therapy is generally prescribed for injuries like muscle strains. Avoiding physical therapy after it is prescribed for a strain can cause further strain to the already injured muscle or muscles surrounding it, injure surrounding areas, or even cause chronic pain. These injuries that occur from avoiding physical therapy can be worse than the original injury and can greatly lengthen recovery time.
Wasting Healing Time
Once prescribed physical therapy, patients generally have an idea from their doctor or physical therapist of the time it will take to heal. Attending all of the physical therapy sessions that have been scheduled, and maintaining the specific schedule outlined for you, can aid in your healing process and take full advantage of the delicate time period where you are still healing.
Avoiding physical therapy by skipping sessions, pushing sessions back, or even trying to push recovery faster outside of therapy, can waste the healing time and, in fact, make the healing time longer than it would have been if the original physical therapy schedule was maintained.
Longer Term Effects
If you have been injured or had surgery and avoided physical therapy altogether or skipped sessions, there can be great impacts long term, as well. Perhaps you worsened your original injury by avoiding physical therapy. In the case of a serious injury where physical therapy is skipped, there is the potential to cause permanent physical damage.
Unrelated to physical health, but another potential long term effect of potentially skipping physical therapy and allowing a minor injury to become a major one, is the cost associated with treating the new injuries. Avoiding physical therapy can turn a situation from a few sessions of therapy to treat a minor injury into possibly surgery and giant medical bills to treat a worsened injury.
As you can see, there are several ways that avoiding physical therapy can be dangerous. If you have been prescribed physical therapy after an injury or surgery, it is best to follow the instructions of your doctor and physical therapist.
