I had a high school water polo player just recently who was really on the verge of not being able to play due to severe shoulder pain. She was a collegiate potential athlete, scholarship athlete, who was really pretty bummed-out that she couldn't play to the intensity that she wanted to play and quite honestly she thought she may not play again. So she came in a bad place, couldn’t raise her arm, her hand really over her shoulder without some kind of pain. Not quite sure how she was playing water polo. So we reduce the inflammation in her shoulder, helped her regain the strength that she needed to play and more importantly we educated her on the process of how to take care for her shoulder preseason, in season and beyond the shoulder even. Training the core and training how to throw the ball properly so she would avoid such a future injury and the good news is that she did eventually get a full ride scholarship to the college of her choice.
One of my patients who's a self-employed business owner in the cleaning business, who's just a fitness fanatic, works out probably twice a day, 3 hours a day, was in a severe car accident and had been to multiple physicians with chasing the pain as we like to say and one doctor finally said have you came to physical therapist and she was a little hesitant to come in. She kind of pictured physical therapy being for old people and people that were of a much lower level of fitness that she was, but we allowed her to; physical therapy allowed her to get back to where she was. It was a slow process, she had lots of soft tissue injuries and through the process of therapeutic exercise and some mechanics training and ergonomics training and how to sit in her car properly, all reduced the stress of her injuries significantly and she was able to go back to working out.
