As I've started to go to more and more physical therapy places, I've started to realize which ones are actually good versus the supposedly good ones. Southlands model probably works for most injuries but I heavily do not recommend going here if you have thoracic outlet syndrome, One of the rarest and hardest repetitive strain injuries to deal with.
If there's one thing I noticed about many physical therapy places is that they like to treat their patients like a zoo. When you actually see a therapist for like 10 to 15 minutes. It is pretty nice because usually the massage or stretches or whatever they need to do is nice. And from what I've seen, all the therapists are pretty nice.
The issues for me come when we deal with the fact that many physical therapy places use physical therapist assistance. Now I don't dislike the idea of physical therapy assistance, when you have a lot of patients you do have to meet the demand.
However, I found that in practice, usually physical therapy assistance usually have to deal with two to four patients at a time. So when they're the ones who have to show patients, how to do their exercise and then stretches. If it's a common one then it's probably easy to tell the patient how to do it.
The real issue comes is when you do an exercise or stretch and it starts to hurt. For my experience at Southland, the physical therapy assistant will try to give you suggestions to make it hurt less, but it doesn't always work.
Thing that really angers me about a lot of physical therapy places is many times the physical therapy assistance will have to keep going between different people. So you don't even know if you're doing the exercises or stretches correctly.
Southland physical therapy sadly falls this very common practice. What does it help is if you need to find an alternate way to do exercises and the physical therapy assistant doesn't know of a way to do it. Many times they will have to default to asking the actual physical therapist for help but they're usually busy with somebody else.
I already gone to a couple other physical therapy places that have full on one to one physical therapy to patient practices, which I like a lot more. Not only does the physical therapist get to see you for the whole 40 minutes, but they get to intimately help you make sure you're doing the correct exercises with the right form and everything.
I know that physical therapy assistance is probably a popular job since it's a nice way to get foot in the door. And stuff. I've been to places where even though they had physical therapy assistance, they at least only had one to two patients a time at most and they were a lot better at figuring out alternatives for exercises that hurt.
However, sadly Southland physical therapies practice does it in the typical way that I don't like. We just unfortunate because the people there are actually nice enough which is the only reason I didn't give this a lower star rating.
However, after just 2 to 3 weeks I couldn't take the fact that after every session I just felt like another animal in the zoo to take care of, hell. More like half taken care of because the physical therapist abandons you after 10 minutes, and then when a physical therapy assistant doesn't know how to help you, they just put you on electric stimulation.
Another smaller note, this room is really tiny yet they somehow cram in a lot of patience. Somehow they still find a way to walk away from a patient and not keep track of their form of exercising and stretching if they needed it.
To reiterate, if you have a relatively common issue, were you just need minimal watching then? I guess Southland physical therapy works well enough, but it's basically just like any other insurance supported physical therapist.
After these last 2 years, I've much preferred one-to-one physical therapist to patient practices, so I will not be supporting places like this anymore. read more