Week 1

Hello everybody,

            I had a very fun and exciting week working at Synergy. Not only did I collect information from patients, but I also learned some therapy techniques and exercises. I spent most of the time following Vincent’s instruction in assessing the patients and supervising their activities. The more time I spend there, the more I learn about the detailed motions that can determine mobility and health.

            The most surprising revelation I had involved the overall concept of physical therapy. Vincent has a clear, basic theme of dealing with an injury. When an injury occurs, either by a problem in the muscles or bones, scar tissue builds around the injury and the patient loses mobility or experiences pain in that area. He believes that the effective method requires breaking down the scar tissue, re-injuring the site to promote blood flow and vascular reconstruction, and then healing the muscles the way he wants to. The surprising aspect is how uncommon his method is. Other physical therapy studios will just focus on stretching the affected area and trying to slowly build up muscle there. The patients will usually see initial improvement, just from increased strength, but cannot fully resolve the underlying issue because the damaging effects were never removed.

            I initially expected for physical therapy to orient around building back a muscle that is weakened from injury. Instead, it is all about the balance between muscles, their counterparts, and tendons. When an agonist muscle is injured, the antagonist muscles will overcompensate as the patient’s movement is altered to involve the antagonist muscles more. Therefore, the agonist muscle will stiffen from underuse as the patient has already adjusted their way of moving, and the antagonist muscle can stiffen from overuse. Also, if a muscle near a joint is injured, the tendons of that muscle will take on the workload, causing tendinitis, which results in soreness around the joint. For example, Bill, a golfer I worked with, couldn’t swing his arm due to the tendinitis he developed after undergoing a debris-cleanup surgery in the arm and an arthroscopic shoulder surgery. Vincent, through cross friction, reinjured the inflamed tendons, and although painful, promoted blood flow and regained muscle by isolated resistance exercises. Now the muscle is starting to take over once again as the main motor for movement, and Bill was able to play 9 holes just a few days ago.

            Given how interesting and creative Vincent’s methods are, I am considering reshaping my project thesis to revolve around physical therapy methods rather than what factors make physical therapy effective. This seems less intuitive and leaves plenty of more research to perform, whereas my previous question had some expected results. This week I introduced you to the basics that I learned. He has a very concrete concept of physical therapy and he summarizes it best: “Everybody has the same general design. It never changes. I just have to put the body back to its normal design.”