Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. Recently, I ran into a woman who was suffering from knee pain. Her question to me that prompted this video was why should I go to physical therapy when I don’t have a diagnosis? So let’s go back a little bit. I’m gonna talk to you about how I originally met her and then I’ll tell you what my answer to that question was originally.
I met her just in the course of my usual day, so she’s not a client, she’s just somebody who was talking about how bad her knees bothered her. What she was describing and where she was on this path, she said that she already had a doctor’s appointment. So she was gonna go and see what the doctor was gonna tell her about what was going on in her knee.
I said, “Well, what did your doctor tell you?”
And she goes, “Nothing. He did x-rays that came back with nothing on them. Then he was gonna send me for an MRI, but basically all he did was offer me anti-inflammatories and then he told me to go to physical therapy.”
I said back, “well, that was actually pretty good advice. Obviously you should go see a physical therapist.”
She goes, “Well, why would I see him or go to make a therapy appointment when I don’t have a diagnosis, I don’t actually know what’s wrong with my knee.”
My answer to her was that, when you go see a medical doctor, their job is to kind of look at your whole internal structure. They want to see on an x-ray or an MRI, if there is any reason for a surgery, or if there’s any reason to give you medication.
If your doctor is suggesting that you go to physical therapy, or even if they’re not, and they’re just saying that your knee is fine. What that means in that context is that you don’t need to worry about having a surgery, because there’s nothing there that indicates that you need surgery. If they’re not offering you medication, then it means that they don’t see any inflammation or anything inside that joint that tells them that they need to help you with a pharmaceutical to get rid of the pain.
Now, for some doctors, they never suggest physical therapy and for others they do. In both cases, physical therapy is definitely an option. I, with my huge bias, strongly suggest going to see a physical therapist, this is my big push for that.
No matter what is happening, for this person it was her knee, I can give a very specific example.
She’s having problems bending, like she can’t bend her knee. She has problems. When she walks for really long times, she has problems standing at the grocery store because her knee just starts to bother her. Then it starts to feel like it’s gonna give out. This problem for her has been lasting for several months, it’s just slowly and slowly getting worse and worse until it prompted her, where she would go to the doctor.
Now she’s sitting in this space where she’s like, they’re not telling me what’s wrong with my knee and they’ve looked inside of it because they’ve seen an x-ray. They were gonna send me for the MRI and then they decided not to. This is where she’s sitting in her mindset.
I’m gonna go someplace and they’re gonna be moving things around. How dangerous is that?
What I was able to tell her is that when a physical therapist does an evaluation, they also look at your whole body, but we’re gonna be looking at how you move. We’re gonna bend the joint. We’re going to test your muscles. We’re going to test the ligaments. We’re gonna be doing all these hands on tests to see what the quality of your motion is and what is going on with your joint. Also what’s going on at the joint above and the joint below.
Specifically with knees it’s very rare, I would say that it does not happen, that if you have a knee problem that you do not also have something going on in your ankle or your hip.
Just me saying that to this young lady,
she’s like “Oh yeah, I roll my ankle all the time, it’s like, it’s like a weekly thing. I roll my ankle, it swells up a little bit and then it, then it’s fine.”
And she’s like, “and you know, when I was in high school, I did do something to my hip, but I don’t remember what it was and it went away after a little bit.”
I said, “Well, those are things that the therapist will be able to help you look at, look at just how everything else is affecting your knee. Not just your knee, because your knee could be having pain because something else is putting stress on it.”
And she’s like, “Oh, okay. So they’re actually gonna put their hands on me and really feel around and tell me what’s going on with the muscle and the joint.” And I was like,”Yes!”
No therapy is gonna do anything so aggressive that they injure you. Just moving your joints, if you’re able to walk, they can’t hurt you. There’s nothing in a physical therapy assessment or evaluation that could be harmful to you. The nice thing is a lot of the same, like a lot of the hands on tests are diagnostic, not medical diagnostic, in that sense, we’d have to send you back to a medical doctor.
We can tell if there is some form of ligament that needs to be assessed with an MRI, we can see if the inside of the joint is stable enough, that the likelihood of any kind of ligament damage is not there.
There’s lots of things that we can do with our hands-on assessment that not only tells us how we’re gonna treat you, but rules out anything that could be devastatingly going on in that joint.
After our conversation, she felt a whole lot more comfortable going in and seeing her local therapist, unfortunately, that was not me, but somebody else was so much closer to her house. She went down there and she’s like, “oh, I feel so much better. I knowing what’s going on. That really helped. Something was going on in my hip, they did a few things and just leaving the eval. I felt so much better. I’m so thankful that you came and talked to me.”
I just wanted to share that because I don’t think she’s the only person that’s ever wondered, “but if I don’t know exactly what’s going on with my knee or my body part, or what’s going on, then how can I go to see physical therapy? Because they’re just gonna have me move around and won’t I possibly injure that.”
That is not the case. We, the physical therapist, will do a full assessment. The idea is to come up with a root cause of the injury and then help you with treatment. But just moving that joint is definitely not gonna injure you.
I hope that this information is very helpful and it helps you make the decision to go see somebody sooner than later. Because it’s always easier if you see somebody sooner. Hope you have a good day. Bye.
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