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Physical therapy (PT) helps people recover from surgery, an accident or injury. PT also helps when a person’s body is not functioning at what is considered normal for them—perhaps they had a heart attack, stroke or fall; or are dealing with a neurological disease; or even facing aging and incontinence.

Physical therapy helps when the body is changing in a way that is affecting function and quality of life. A physical therapist evaluates a person from the standpoint of their mobility, balance and strength. What are they having difficulty doing? What do they want to get back to doing? The basic premise of physical therapy is that you’re looking at the person’s physical dysfunction and determining the steps to take to improve the person’s physical condition.

There’s always an element of patient education to help people discover what they are doing on a daily basis that could be contributing to their problem. The physical therapist may need to re-educate a person on lifting something correctly or moving properly.

During a PT session, the therapist usually applies hands-on techniques such as joint mobilization for a stiff joint, or soft-tissue work of stretching or massaging tight muscles. Some physical therapists also do manual manipulation, which uses careful, directed manual force to improve mobility in joints, connective tissue or skeletal muscles.

Physical therapists sometimes push people beyond their limit or comfort zone a little bit, encouraging them to go beyond what they think they can do. Physical therapists try to look at things objectively and implement different tests with patients.

We try to empower people to kind of fix themselves. We don’t want them to have to keep coming back. Ultimately, we’re trying to get people to a point where they can maintain themselves and do their exercises at home or at the gym and go on with their lives. We push people so they can be independent and not reliant on us, medication or other treatments.

Oftentimes people go to therapy only two or three times a week depending on their insurance and payment options. The responsibility for improvement falls on the individual, too. The stretching and strengthening exercises are really something that has to be done almost daily.

You’re not going to get the progress or improvement you need just relying on going to your therapy visits, so you have to do exercises at home. And, by the way, we can always tell if someone is being good about doing his or her home exercise program or not.

The timeline of healing and recovery is going to be longer, because with the aging process, seniors don’t heal as quickly as someone younger. But at the same time, I still think seniors are not a population of people who should be discounted.

I don’t want people to say, “You’re 90, who cares?” You look at the individual, what their life is like, how active they are and their motivation. You may not be as aggressive with some of the modalities and exercises for seniors, but you continue to treat them like you would anyone else. You just expect their physical recovery to take longer.

When care clients come home with an exercise program, caregivers can encourage their clients to do the exercises. The caregivers are not prescribing the exercises. Many clients get pictures of their physical therapy exercises, and caregivers can go through the pictures with the clients. Oftentimes, care clients respond better to a caregiver than maybe their spouse or family member.

Caregivers are also helpful when a client is a fall risk or their balance is off and they still need to get up and walk or get their heart rate or breathing up. Also, caregivers are trained to recognize anything unusual with their client, and the caregivers report those changes to their supervisor. That’s the value of the regular interaction between the client and caregiver. They get to know each other, and the caregiver recognizes when something is off.