We have a new member joining the SKBO/Versus team as of this week.
Rhyl Jenkins is a highly qualified Osteopath, with over 7 years of experience working in various clinical settings around the country before settling back to her home town of Melbourne.
Rhyl joins the team here bringing with her a vast level of experience in Clinical Rehabilitation, and Injury Management & Rehab, as well as Workplace Health & Ergonomics.
As such she is the perfect professional to lead our Clinical Rehab team at Versus, and providing the bridge between the treatment room and the training space!
You can read more about Rhyl here.
Rhyl is available at Versus on TUES 5pm – 8pm and SAT 9am – 12am.
Injury recovery versus rehabilitation
What differentiates injury recovery versus rehabilitation?
As Osteopaths we typically see our patients presenting with pain & dysfunction.
By this we mean, you come in all banged up, sore, and stiff, can’t move this way or that and not moving well due to pain, muscles tightness, usually inflamed and a bit injured basically.
Sure, the body is designed to heal itself and hence Recover, but does it Rehabilitate? Rehabilitation is the final step and can be forgotten as often your pain has gone.
At the clinic, we take a history & assess how you are moving – not just the painful area but your entire body! Then determine where you are sore, and not moving well, and then work out what has happened and why!
You often have an idea of what has happened but not always the why… The why is what drives our treatment plan so that we don’t simply focus on the symptoms you are experiencing right now but we aim to reduce the risk of this happening again.
Eg. I hurt my lower back bending to put my shoes on this morning! Sure, this seems quite obvious, but the real question is, why this morning have you injured your back doing this ‘normal’ activity that you do every day?
Our goal is to answer this question so we can really treat the cause of your problem and give you the best outcome so this doesn’t happen again, for ‘no reason’!!
This underlying cause may be related to other activities that have overloaded and compromised your back function – mobility and strength. Which could be anything from excessive sitting, to heavy lifting – and everything else in between! There may also be other factors such as poor trunk (core) strength or support that adds to the problem and is often related to an old injury.
These are called predisposing or underlying factors that essentially mean you are prone to these types of injuries from time to time. Injury rehabilitation addresses these underlying issues and gets you to a stronger and more stable state that will not only avoid further injury but allow you to function & perform at a higher level.
This is what we mean when we say that Rehab gets you from the treatment room to the training space, but more than that to a better level of training & performance.
We touched on old injuries often being behind these underlying factors that still cause us trouble today. And this is where Recovery & Rehab differ.
We all know somebody with a ‘bad knee’, ‘bad back’ or ‘bad shoulder’ due to an old injury that may not have been fully rehabilitated. Sure, they have recovered to a degree, but what about Rehabilitation?
It is important to remember that these old injuries often have a compromised function and can change the way our body moves. Rehabilitation addresses this and aims to get you moving again – to your full potential!
Let’s use the example of a ‘bad knee’ due to playing footy in your 20s. You may have recovered and perhaps you stopped playing footy or decreased your activity so you hardly notice your ‘bad knee’ anymore. But you probably identify it as your ‘bad knee’ because it has compromised function or may not bend the entire way.
So how do you manage to bend down or put your shoes on if you’re not using your knee to your full potential? Often you will favour the other side or put more pressure through your hips and lower back. Over the years this can lead to the weakening of the whole chain or mechanics and results in a bad hip, and or back some 15-20 years later – Recovery VERSUS Rehabilitation.