It may be that your injuries are new and temporary, or old and only starting to interfere.
There may be disease involved or something congenital. Whatever you or those you love are
experiencing as a physical impediment, physical therapy is extremely important.
Unless you are or have been an athlete,dancers included, most of us never fully inhabit our bodies.
There's no instruction book and plenty of distractions to keep us living in our heads.
This is true for most "able bodied" people;how much more so for the damaged.
It's impossible to explain the surrealism of living in a body that refuses to comply.
I can't say what it's like to live in a body that never functioned normally. In either case,
the right physical therapist can help you re-integrate your mind, body, and emotions.
There's a natural urge to retreat from the physical self when it's experienced as a source of pain.
You don't make a conscious descision to retreat, it just happens. Without therapeutic intervention
you will continue to lose function and your quality of life will diminish. We want the opposite, right?
A good P.T. or D.P.T. can teach you how to use whatever you do have in a way that maximizes your strengths, finds work-arounds for weaknesses,and helps you to understand the body you have.
D.P.T.'s are doctors of physical therapy. This is a relatively new discipline, a Ph.D in physical therapy.
(It's like having a "shrink" for your body!)
Eventually it will be possible to make an appointment directly with a D.P.T. who can then treat ,refer, or prescribe the way an orthopedist or neurologist does. The goal is to make these practices more reciprocal
and have them function as a team for the patient's benefit.
There's more to say, a lot more, next time.
(What I'd like right now is a beach towel, a frozen margarita and a really bad book. Cheers!)
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