DEFINITION
PHYSIOTHERAPY:
The treatment of disease, injury, or deformity by physical methods such as massage, heat treatment, and exercise rather than by drugs or surgery.
REHABILITATION:
The action of restoring someone to health or normal life through training and therapy after imprisonment, addiction, or illness.
OVERVIEW:
Physical therapy addresses the illnesses or injuries that limit a person's abilities to move and perform functional activities in their daily lives. PTs use an individual's history and physical examination to arrive at a diagnosis and establish a management plan and, when necessary, incorporate the results of laboratory and imaging studies like X-rays, CT-scan, or MRI findings. Electrodiagnostic testing (e.g., electromyograms and nerve conduction velocity testing) may also be used.
PT management commonly includes prescription of or assistance with specific exercises, manual therapy, and manipulation, mechanical devices such as traction, education, electrophysical modalities which include heat, cold, electricity, sound waves, radiation, assistive devices, prostheses, orthoses, and other interventions.
In addition, PTs work with individuals to prevent the loss of mobility before it occurs by developing fitness and wellness-oriented programs for healthier and more active lifestyles, providing services to individuals and populations to develop, maintain and restore maximum movement and functional ability throughout the lifespan. This includes providing treatment in circumstances where movement and function are threatened by aging, injury, disease, or environmental factors. Functional movement is central to what it means to be healthy.
HISTORY:
Physicians like Hippocrates and later Galen are believed to have been the first practitioners of physical therapy, advocating massage, manual therapy techniques and hydrotherapy to treat people in 460 BC. After the development of orthopedics in the eighteenth century, machines like the Gymnasticon were developed to treat gout and similar diseases by systematic exercise of the joints, similar to later developments in physical therapy.
The earliest documented origins of actual physical therapy as a professional group date back to Per Henrik Ling, "Father of Swedish Gymnastics," who founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics (RCIG) in 1813 for manipulation, and exercise. Up until 2014, the Swedish word for a physical therapist was suk gymnast = someone involved in gymnastics for those who are ill, but the title was then changed to fysioterapeut (physiotherapist), the word used in the other Scandinavian countries. In 1887, PTs were given official registration by Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare. Other countries soon followed. In 1894, four nurses in Great Britain formed the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. The School of Physiotherapy at the University of Otago in New Zealand in 1913, and the United States 1914 Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which graduated "reconstruction aides."Since the profession's inception, spinal manipulative therapy has been a component of the physical therapist practice.
IMPORTANCE:
Physiotherapists help people affected by injury, illness or disability through movement and exercise, manual therapy, education and advice. They maintain health for people of all ages, helping patients to manage pain and prevent disease. The importance of PT include:
•HOLISTIC HEALING.
•PREVENT SURGERY.
•IMPROVE YOUR ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE
•MANAGE A DISEASE.
•IMPROVE BALANCE.
•TREAT INCONTINENCE
•MANAGE ARTHRITIS.
•ASSIST IN THE MANAGEMENT OF BLOOD PRESSURE.
•IMPROVE YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE.
•PREVENT INJURIES FROM OCCURRING.
Artemis Dee
