What Are the Tasks of a Physical Therapist?

A Physical Therapist will serve their patients in helping them to relieve pain, improve their mobility, and help to prevent any permanent physical damage that may cause disability.

Patients of a Physical Therapy may include people who suffer from severe back pain, shoulder pain, fractures, heart disease, arthritis, and head injuries, to name a few. Sometimes, the work of a physical therapist can be physically demanding as they may have to help move patients and help them make certain body movements during therapy. Besides helping move their patients, in Physical Therapy a therapist may also have to move around heavy equipment sometimes.

Physical Therapy have access to their patients medical histories and will examine them so that they can test their patients strength and muscle performance, range of motion, balance, posture and so on. For instance, if a patient has a rotary cuff injury, they will have a hard time raising their arm straight up. The physical Therapy will continually test that patient to see if improvements are made as treatment goes on. Their goal here is to get their patient to raise their arm without pain and to reach that point, the Physical Therapy will have to develop a strategy and a plan to get the healthy outcome that he/she and the patient desire.

To treat patients, the Physical Therapist may have their patients do exercises for them, especially for those who may have problems with certain body movements that most healthy people usually take for granted. The Physical Therapist will try as hard as they can to get their patient to get all normal range of motions back and increase flexibility as much as possible. The patients will need these normal range of motions to get by in everyday life whether at home or at their job, the Physical Therapy has a goal to see that it is achieved.

Aid products that you may see a Physical Therapist use are things such as hot packs or cold compresses. These are used to help relieve pain that a person may be experiencing. Other gadgets that a Physical Therapist use are electrical stimulation and ultrasounds, whatever it takes to relieve the pain from their patients and make them feel better. Massages are done my Physical Therapist to ease pain, massages also help to improve circulation of the patients.

Physical Therapy jobs include teaching your patients how to keep healthy and strong when they go home to fully exert their recovery, exercising may be part of the plan. They may teach the patient how to use crutches, wheelchairs, and other things.

Physical Therapy jobs include lots of follow up with their patients. When a patient is sent home they will have to visit their Physical Therapist from time to time so that progress can be examined. When necessary, modification of treatment will be ordered. For this reason, physical therapy work closely with physicians, social workers, speech language pathologist, occupational therapist, educators, nurses, as well as other professionals to help patients recover.