What's the most important thing for a patient to understand about physical therapy after a spinal cord injury?

We’re a team. I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to help guide you through what you need to do in order to get home, and to be as strong and as independent and functional as possible. And we can’t work in silos; we can’t work alone, we have to work together, and the team really does actually start with the patient. I want to know a patient’s goals, and I am going to help them achieve those goals as much as I possibly can within their diagnostic group, but we have to work together. I’m not there to be their enemy, and I’m not there to be the bad guy to tell them, “No, you must weight shift,” “you must do this” but we have to work together. Because I will always be there for my patients, to help support them with whatever we do. The facility that I work at, we tell all of our patients, “Just because you leave—the door never closes. We want to make sure that if you need something from your therapist, that you can always come back and talk to us.”

I think someone after a spinal cord injury would benefit from working with a physical therapist to help them stay flexible, get stronger. The muscles that are still innervated can be strengthened. And, the physical therapist can help in strengthening those muscles in order to provide them the ability to do things like move around in the bed, get out of bed, push a wheelchair, go back to work, go back to school, participate in the roles of their family and the leisure activities that they enjoy participating in.

The most important thing for a patient to understand about physical therapy is that it's physical work that you have to do with the guidance of the therapist. And the therapists can't do it for you and the therapists can try all they want, but you have to participate and you have to do the work. That being said, sometimes you still may not achieve the things that you want to achieve because of the type of spinal cord injury you have, and it's not your fault and it's not the fault of anybody else. It's just how your body is healing from the spinal cord injury.