What Is Physical Therapy?
You were told to rest it. You rested it, and it came back the first week you went back to doing the thing you actually care about. Somewhere in there you started planning around it: which shoe, which side to sleep on, which hill to skip, how far into the walk you can go before you turn around. Physical therapy is the work of undoing all of that. It restores how your body moves, and it does that without leaning on medication or surgery to quiet the signal. Your evaluation starts with your history and everything you have already tried, then moves to how you actually move: posture and gait, joint by joint range, and strength testing that shows where the imbalance sits. That is how the breakdown driving your symptoms gets found instead of guessed at. From there your physical therapist builds the plan, and treatment draws on hands-on manual therapy, instrument-assisted soft tissue work, therapeutic exercise for strength and neuromuscular control, dry needling where a muscle needs it, and plain teaching about posture and load so you know what you are doing and why. The plan moves through four phases, in this order. Pain: calm the tissue and the nervous system down enough to move again. Prime: restore the motion and control the joint lost. Perform: load it, progressively, until it holds under real demand. Prevent: keep the capacity you built so it does not come back.
Then there is the part that should not be a differentiator but is. Your Doctor of Physical Therapy treats you personally, for 40 minutes, every visit, and both of our physical therapists are board-certified orthopedic clinical specialists. Nothing is handed to an aide halfway through and nothing gets lost between visits, because there is nobody to lose it to. North Carolina has unrestricted direct access to physical therapy, so you do not need a physician referral to be evaluated or treated here. Aureum Physio accepts most major insurance plans and verifies your coverage before treatment begins, so you know what your visits cost up front. Most patients come 2 to 3 times a week for 4 to 6 weeks, and many notice a change in the first week or two.
