Put your hands on your hips. Bring your knees in tight.

[venta]

A quick request for data points (or actual genuine knowledge, that would also work ;)

I've started getting physio for the duff knees (of which more later). I'm pretty sure that, when I was a kid and there was always someone in my class with a pot arm (usually for reasons of a falling-off-bike nature), no one was offered physio afterwards. A friend tells me that he did not get physio for a broken leg in the late 80s. A colleague who fractured both her arms a couple of years ago did.

So... is it that NHS treatment of injuries has moved on and decided that yes, physio is a bloomin' useful part of recovery? Or is it just that physio isn't offered to kids, on the grounds that they're bound to start running about as soon as physically possible?

Comments

[ylla.livejournal.com]

Or that it's really useful for e.g. a broken elbow and doesn't make a lot of different for e.g. a clean break in the middle of a long bone? I don't know the answer, though.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My friend's brother had physio in the late 70s after a smashed up shoulder. We were 6 or 7 so he'd have been 9 at most; the lad who broke his thigh and hip at secondary school (~12) had months of physio because the broken bone ends damaged a lot of muscle. [And this is why "bundles" are a terrible terrible idea. I wasn't in it, thankfully, but I still remember watching him being carried off the field and feeling dreadful that we had ever done such a thing.]

I think as ylla says, it's mostly because childhood injuries are usually easily healed breaks in the middle of straight bones, and thus physio isn't a vast amount of help. But I got no physio after my knee was damaged in 1996; when I did the same thing to the same knee in 2000 I got offered physio. Not sure if that was a policy change or merely "if you do it twice, it needs physio".

[shermarama]

Only a data point, but when my sister tore ligaments in her knee on a dry ski slope in about 1986, the NHS just put the whole lot in plaster and were going to leave it there for 6 weeks, despite there being no broken bones. A family friend who was a physio objected strongly to this, so they went private (as I recall), got the plaster removed, and she had a brace and physio treatment instead, which had her a long way to recovered after 6 weeks instead of stumping around in plaster all that time.

[ladythmpr.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: I am in the USA.

I broke my ankle horribly in 1980 at age 18, and got no physio. (Looking back, since I could barely walk after the cast was removed after 14 weeks, I probably should have gotten some, but I was young and what did I know then?)

In the past 10-15 years, for major injuries (broken thumb, torn meniscus), and some minor ones (tendonitis, arthritis), I have been offered physio. It does work for me, but usually in 12 weeks, not the 6 weeks that is normally prescribed. It means that I have to go back and get another prescription if the first 6 weeks didn't get me totally back in working order, but that inconvenience is so worth it.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

So, I broke my left radial ulna (top of fore-arm, basically elbow) when 6, and my right radial ulna when 20. Both same mechanism - falling onto outstretched arm, coupled with hyperflexion in elbows, leads to the shock being absorbed by the elbow rather than the collarbone, leading to a fracture.

Both injuries were given a 6-week prognosis of getting better.
Neither were plastered, but I was advised to not move the first injury, and was given physio for the second.

Both hurt a bloomin' lot, and the second was extremely painful when doing the exercises. However, I think I was using my right arm with less pain sooner than my left.

According to the physio for the second, it was a change in best practice for the treatment. And also, she had to grab her colleagues to squeal about how much my elbows bent backwards :) ("Oh, you're doing really well! This is nearly straight!" "Yes, but we're aiming for this for normal" "Ooooh, not seen one bend as far back as that before!")

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Have three anecdotes. That makes data!

As a teenager in the mid-80s, I fell over on to my hand and they thought I had a scaphoid fracture. They stuck my hand and arm in a pot for many weeks, but when they took it out again and X-rayed it, they decided I hadn't fractured it after all. But my hand and forearm were wasted away and feeble in a slightly terrifying way. I got minimal physio - they handed me a 2cm-diameter plastic tube and told me to grasp and ungrasp it to build up the strength. After it was recovered a bit, it occurred to me that I could give myself exercises to build it up simply by carrying my school bag in that hand. To this day it has stronger muscles, despite being my non-dominant hand.

My brother had a nasty soft-tissue leg injury playing football in the late 80s. I forget the details but it was of a similar magnitude to yours. It was one of those stupid things where, in the rush of play, he stood on the ball awkwardly and fell off with a twisty motion. He got more serious physio for that and - having tried ignoring the exercises and then doing them - he is now an evangelist for doing what the physio tells you. So long as it does work.

Much more recently - like a couple of years ago or so - he had a knee problem which needed surgery. The exercises his first physio gave him were desperately painful and he was making no progress a fortnight later when he turned up for a checkup. A different physio managed to say, in a professional manner, that the previous one had given him terrible advice, before giving him very different exercises, and those helped a lot.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Tinies generally heal quicker, too, don't they?

[lnr]

When I sprained my ankle badly and chipped the bone I found the fracture clinic were pretty useless - they basically sent me away with my big velcro boot and told me I might be OK to cycle in about 6 weeks and to walk on it as I felt able. So I paid for some private physio. For me it was really worth it - and interestingly the physio herself thought it should be pretty much standard for all bad sprains.