3 Benefits Of Telehealth Physical Therapy Many Don't Know

My practice has always focused on solving two complaints I heard often in my early career: frequent appointments being difficult to attend and not enough time with the therapist in these appointments. Miller Physical Therapy addresses this by providing in home physical therapy as well as at your gym or office. At our clinic, we never overlap patients. All our paperwork is online and can be quickly filled out at home. Your therapy exercises are completed at home as much as possible so not to waste treatment time in the clinic. Because the sessions are fully one-on-one, we usually only need to see our patients 1-2 times a week. This is all part of what I consider essential to an excellent physical therapy experience.

When you compare 1-2 appointments to the standard recommendation of 3 appointments a week for 6 to 8 weeks, the time savings is huge. Apart from this, many clinics only give you 15 minutes with your therapist. The rest of the hour is spent with a tech or personal trainer. That lack of interaction with your PT may interfere with getting good results.

WIth the recommendation for social distancing, I was quite pleased to discover that telehealth physical therapy (sometimes referred to as telemedicine physical therapy) shares some very important common ground with in-person sessions.

I believe that the best physical therapy in New York will provide the following: excellent communication, an accurate diagnosis, and effective treatment. I have set up Miller Physical Therapy to focus on these 3 components for every patient. I continue to work toward making that experience better and more consistent. 

Telehealth PT, to the surprise of some, is no different. Practicing excellent communication is the essential to the session. Your therapist must be skilled at understanding how to communicate ideas and test their diagnosis. Doing this well will result in an accurate conclusion on the source of the problem. At Miller Physical Therapy, we use a standardized diagnostic process that we can teach to our patients to do on their own. This means less dependence on your PT to get great results.

Once we find the cause of the issue, the treatment is still based around getting a highly personalized and targeted home routine. Telehealth for physical therapy makes this even easier to accomplish for several reasons.

Below are 3 benefits many don’t immediately consider when looking at telehealth physical therapy to treat their aches and pains

1. Accessibility
When your therapist is a simple video call away, adjusting the program becomes very fast and efficient. If something isn’t working, or you’re experiencing increased pain, you will get personalized help faster.

Finding the right therapist can be difficult sometimes. There are hundreds of options when it comes to getting help for your aches and pains. Finding the right practitioner can be very important. We all need to have a therapy partnership that feels productive, helpful and effective. I know individuals who travel over an hour to come and see me. When you find the right therapist, and you can get help from them without losing 2 hours of commuting time or more, that is a big deal.
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2. Increased Independence
Every technique and treatment application is adjusted in your telehealth session for you alone. It’s set up in a way that will also increase your confidence. In an in-person session, I typically spend 15 minutes teaching how to adapt the treatment into a home program. Even with that time, I find patients come back wanting to review an exercise or technique because they weren’t sure they had it right.
Telehealth services start the process of creating a home program almost immediately. Your home program is also the treatment you just completed. This increases the likelihood that you’ll be successful on your own outside of a telehealth PT session.

 3. Significantly More Free Information
So, this may not be a true statement for all telehealth physical therapy companies in New York. But it is true of our goal. We want to make our treatments, our services and treatment techniques available to as many individuals as possible.

To start this process, we’re hosting monthly online physical therapy workshops and webinars. We’ll be covering our most common questions and topics related to specific professions and sports. The first topic (since it seemed pretty relevant right now) is “A Physical Therapist's Guide To Working From Home: Find, Correct and Prevent Negative Health Effects at Home.”

We’ll cover the common causes of aches and pains related to sitting at a desk all day. If your home office is less than adequate - a couch and coffee table for a home office can really wear your body down - then this is definitely appropriate for you. Our community consists of many active professionals that spend a large part of their day in meetings, on the computer or sitting. So even if working at home isn’t in your long term outlook, you may still find a lot of helpful information. Our goal is to make getting acquainted with online physical therapy easy and worth your time.

If you’re someone who likes to exercise, be active but are currently struggling with aches and pains that get worse while working, consider signing up. If you have a question that you’d like specifically answered, you’ll fit right in with these webinars. In each one, we’ll take live questions. We’ll give you the best advice possible to get you started on your own program at home and hopefully resolve concerns you might have about a pain or injury. 

If you find yourself enjoying and getting value from this type of physical therapy advice, you’ll likely find tele physical therapy equally as helpful. The difference will be that you have a deeply personalized plan and an expert partner to help you in your recovery.

We’ve worked with a large array of professions including real estate, finance, banking, entrepreneurs and small business owners. We also work with professional actors and dancers. Part of our work includes preventative and wellness PT for shows like "Kinky Boots," "Phantom of the Opera," "Dear Evan Hansen," "Choir Boy,” “Oklahoma” and others.

What Our Typical Online Webinar Will Include

• An active test for the body part we’ll be focusing on. For example, if we’re discussing neck pain or headaches while sitting, we’ll walk you through how to test your neck mobility and stability. Once you figure out what is limiting your neck, we discuss 
• Specific tips and tricks for resolving the issue and preventing it from returning. We’ll cover what I teach my patients in a typical session. Depending on the topic and the focus, this may be broad concepts or targeted exercises.
• Question and answer. You’ll have the opportunity to write a question when you register or to ask a question live during the presentation. This means a chance to understand more how we might approach your specific pain or injury.

Conclusion
For many, these online workshops are enough to help them eliminate basic aches and pains. If that’s the case, then fantastic! We love helping as many people as possible. If you’re still having pain or it feels like you could use personalized expert advice, you may want to consider booking a telehealth appointment.
 Finding the best physical therapy can be challenging. Getting to know your therapist and how they work is a big step toward finding the best option for you.  If you’re unsure about whether telehealth physical therapy will work for you, or have any other doubts, sign up for a free webinar or free phone consultation to find out more. 

Finding the therapist that is best for you may take some time, but it shouldn’t be hard. We hope we’ve made it easy to get to know us and how we can help.