Moving Day!

It has been fun while it lasted but thanks to an invitation from my physical therapist colleague Dr. Eric Robertson, I will now be doing my Physical Therapy related blog authoring at www.npathinktank.com (soon to be ptthinktank.com).  We will also be joined by fellow colleague and blogger Roderick Henderson, PT for what should be topically varied content relevant to our profession from various perspectives.

I hope you will follow and join us at this new virtual water cooler as fellow community members and stakeholders in our future as physical therapists.  I’m looking very forward to what should be an informative, enlightening and occasionally even entertaining venture with my fellow bloggers and colleagues.

Physical Therapists offer help for Incontinence

Urinary incontinence, or the complaint of involuntary leakage of urine, is not just something that happens to older people. This condition can affect men and women of all ages. The National Association for Incontinence estimates that 25 million Americans experience urinary incontinence.

Stress Incontinence is a sudden involuntary loss of urine on effort or exertion. This may occur with activities such as exercising, sneezing, coughing or laughing. Stress incontinence usually results from weakness and lack of support in the muscles of the pelvic floor. Women with stress incontinence often have “under active” pelvic floor muscles. Causes may be pregnancy or childbirth, injury or trauma, surgery in the vagina or rectum, episiotomy (during childbirth), or lack of exercise or use.

Urge Incontinence is the loss of urine that occurs as soon as you get the urge to urinate. Women with urge incontinence often have weak and “over active” pelvic floor muscles.

Mixed Incontinence is involuntary loss of urine associated with urgency and also with exertion, effort, sneezing or coughing. Mixed incontinence can include any combination of the causes of stress and urge incontinence.

Many symptoms of urinary incontinence are caused by pelvic floor muscle weakness and dysfunction. Our specially trained pelvic floor physical therapists are the ideal healthcare providers to help you gain control over your symptoms. Our therapists use their specialized medical training to evaluate your problem and design an individualized treatment program to meet your specific needs.

Physical therapy can:

• Give you control over your bladder and your life


• Save money and embarrassment by allowing less use of pads and undergarments


• Reduce use of medications for incontinence


• Possibly prevent the need for surgery

Physical therapy treatment may include:

• Education on diet and nutrition to avoid food and beverages that may irritate the bladder


• Advice on how to change behaviors that make symptoms worse


• Techniques to increase awareness of the correct use of muscles that control urinary flow


• Exercises to strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor


• Exercises to stretch and strengthen other important muscles to help you gain control


• Techniques to decrease urinary urge and frequency


• Biofeedback to help you re-train your muscles


• Electrical stimulation to improve awareness and strengthen muscles

You should be referred to a pelvic physical therapist if:

• You leak urine during normal daily activities


• You leak urine with sneezing, coughing, or laughing


• You have difficulty starting a urine stream


• You have trouble holding urine when you feel a strong urge to go


• You urinate frequently (more than every 3-4 hours during the day, up more than once to urinate at night)


• You have difficulty getting to the bathroom because of other problems such as pain or balance.
  
  At Fauquier Health Outpatient Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, our pelvic physical therapy team has completed extensive training in pelvic physical therapy through the American Physical Therapy Association. Our therapists use a variety of techniques as well as provide you with education to ensure your needs are addressed. All pelvic floor treatments are conducted confidentially with your therapist in a comfortable, private setting.
  
  If you feel you may benefit from this service and would like to hear more, please call us at 540-316-2680. Or click on the button below to ask a question.
  

"© Andy Nowack Dreamstime.com"

Do you suffer from dizziness?

You are not alone. Did you know that symptoms of dizziness are the third most frequent reason people over the age of 65 seek medical attention? Dizziness is the number one reason people over the age of 70 seek medical attention.

Fifty percent of individuals over the age of 65 who suffer from dizziness will develop a particular form of vertigo that can be alleviated with one simple physical therapy treatment. The most common form of vertigo is Benign Paroxsymal Positioning Vertigo (BPPV).

Symptoms include:

• Sudden onset
• Brief episodes of dizziness, typically lasting less than one minute
• A sense of imbalance or motion sensitivity brought on by changes in head position relative to gravity by activities such as:
  o Lying down
  o Rolling over in bed
  o Bending over
  o Looking up

BPPV is caused by tiny crystals being dislodged in the inner ear causing changes in the movement of lymph fluid, giving you the sensation you are losing your balance.

Fortunately, this problem is easily detected and can be treated with a few different repositioning techniques to move the crystals through the ear canal and “dump” them into an area that no longer causes vertigo. This treatment is usually very successful, with resolution of all symptoms within 1 or 2 therapy sessions.

A Vestibular Rehabilitation course was recently held at Fauquier Hospital and was attended by some of our therapists. They received training in these vestibular techniques and are ready to help alleviate your dizziness. If you feel you may benefit from this service and would like to hear more, please call us at 540-316-2680. Or click on the button below to ask a question.

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Congratulations Andrew!

Outpatient Rehabilitation Services is proud to announce that Andrew Mazur, physical therapist, has received certification from the Aquatic & Rehabilitation Institute. Andrew provides outpatient aquatic physical therapy for adults at our pool in the Fauquier Health Rehabilitation & Nursing Center. Andrew’s patients enjoy the skilled, individualized care he provides that helps them maximize their range of motion, strength & function after an injury, illness or surgery.

We are the only clinic in the area to offer aquatic physical therapy. Our pool is kept at an inviting 92 degrees, optimal for therapeutic exercise.

We also offer aquatic physical therapy for our pediatric patients, provided by Kristine Trimble, our pediatric physical therapist.
If you or someone you know may benefit from aquatic physical therapy, please call us at (540) 316-2680 for further information. We look forward to hearing from you!

Have questions?

Right this way...

We've installed a new directional sign to help clients find their way to our outpatient clinic on the Fauquier Hospital campus. We are located in the Medical Office Building at 253 Veteran's Drive in Warreton, Virginia. Our clinic is on the first floor of the building, to the right of the elevator in the main lobby.

The “Socialized” Practice – Part II

With the advent of the various Internet social networking mediums on the world wide web such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and a host of others combined with other communication tools such as blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and others, the challenge for any professional or in this case physical therapists is to find a way to effectively use these tools to promote their practice and communicate with their patients and/or clients.

Scott Shreeve, who founded Medsphere Systems, coined the term “Millenial Patients” and described them as “defined by their behavior rather than their  age, sex, or demographic.  He goes on to describe how they utilize the Internet for almost every aspect of their daily lives to “meet their personal, social and professional needs.”

This group of people, the so called millenial patients, are not interested in an authoritarian, top down relationship from a professional such as a physical therapist or physician.  They are far more interested in finding a trusted partner with whom they have an ongoing relationship “based on trust, mutual respect and open communication” according to Shreeve.

My experience leads to me to strongly agree with this paradigm and therefore makes me wonder how I can best serve these patients.  I believe that the answer lies within the integration of the various communication tools available through the Internet including email, social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and website based discussion forums into our practices.  The challenge will be determining best practices in the integration and utilization of these amazing tools and I think perhaps the best tool currently at my disposal might just be TxXchange.  (A disclaimer: I do not have any financial involvement with TxXchange other than as a customer.)

In the third party of this series I will look at how I am envisioning the use of the aforementioned tools and particularly TxXchange in tackling some of the challenges of modern practice.

The Socialized Practice - Part I

With the advent and evolution of “the web” that part of the Internet that most people see as “The Internet”, the previously held notion that all information was proprietary and commoditized has been supplanted by the notion that information should be free and open and the normal socioeconomic barriers that determine who knew what have been shattered in the phenomenon frequently referred to the democratizing effects of information on the Internet. 

Professionals who previously held tight control on information within their domain, whether it was lawyers, physicians, physical therapists or any other profession, need to recognize that their closely held treasure trove of information is no longer their proprietary commodity to be doled out at a price they solely determine. 

Citizens can now look up medical conditions, treatments, drug trials, laws, regulations, court filings, contracts, rehabilitation regimens or practically any other information that is able to be printed or disseminated in some form of media as it all eventually ends up freely available on the web somewhere.

If we stipulate that information is not the proprietary commodity it once was and is likely never to be again, what value do professionals bring to the table that consumers will be willing to pay for?  Simply it is Expertise.  Expertise is not easily or quickly acquired.  It is an accumulation of skill, knowledge and experience.

The question then becomes how does one market expertise versus knowledge.  In my next post we will examine some tools and potential tools to address this issue.