Making It Fun, Keeping Them Safe and Injury Free

Meet 10 year-old Bohden Tubbs, a patient of mine who was having trouble in school. Not with his studies, and his behavior was just fine. But every time he raised his hand, his shoulder dislocated.

After dealing with the problem for a while, he told his parents, who took him to an orthopaedist. The diagnosis was hyper mobility. The solution, his physician advised, was physical therapy.

I worked with him for about two months after diagnosing him with multi-directional instability. If Bohden didn’t get treatment and the shoulder kept dislocating and putting stress on the socket, it would eventually cause more problems. It was also something that could adversely affect the rest of his joints.

If you ask Bohden today, he’ll tell you that physical therapy “helped my shoulder and all other parts of my body. It made me stronger.”

He worked so hard, I even nicknamed him The Machine, which stuck.

When it comes to kids, physical therapy is more than just for young athletes recovering from sports injuries – although we see a lot of them and Tubbs himself was an athlete, too.

From infants to teens, physical therapists can offer pediatric patients relief from a number of suffering ailments, ranging from autism, hyper mobility, poor posture or sore backs from toting around heavy backpacks.

What does physical therapy treatment look like for some of the most common ailments we treat?

Posture Problems.
Often, the problem can be traced to weakness in the muscles in the upper and middle back. Even if students try and sit up straight, they can fatigue easily. Physical therapy for those patients entails strengthening muscles equally with a therapy ball and using core exercises to help them stabilize their posture and keep them more upright.

We’ve seen children suffering from posture problems as a result of improper backpack use. For them, physical therapists can design individualized fitness programs to help strengthen muscles in their back, shoulders, neck and elsewhere, to help them carry the backpack loads.

Young Athlete Injury Prevention Programs.
Many of today’s young athletes specialize in one sport and play year-round; they don’t get a break.  At the same time, they’re still growing, and their muscles don’t always catch up with their joints. Physical therapists offer expert advice on proper warm-up, emphasizing light jogging and jumping jacks, for example, before stretching, rather than stretching cold.

Build Strong Bodies.
While we don’t have prescription pads per se, physical therapists will prescribe homework to patients. For our youngest patients, expect them to receive a prescription to play more! It may sound like the simplest of treatments, but across the board, we see good ol’ fashioned playing helps build strong, healthy bodies and minds.

At the end of the day, that’s what children need more than anything.

Pete Elser, MS, PT, OCS, CMTPT, is the Clinical Director of the Tidewater Physical Therapy Norfolk location in Kempsville. Tidewater Physical Therapy features more than 30 Physical Therapy Clinics, five Aquatic Therapy Centers and three Performance Centers from Virginia Beach to Richmond. Learn more about Tidewater Physical Therapy at www.tpti.com.