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Learn about common pain-causing health conditions, their progression paths, their causes, and effective treatment options. Our blog offers valuable information to people who experience pain and anyone who wishes to learn more about long-lasting, safe, and noninvasive treatments.
These articles also explain how Superior Physical Therapy addresses these common health problems through an innovative approach called the Superior Method. This approach aims to accurately identify the underlying cause of pain in order to develop a more tailored and collaborative treatment plan.
Functional Healing for Shoulder Impingement Syndrome Shoulder pain when reaching, lifting, or sleeping on your side? You may be dealing with Shoulder Impingement Syndrome—a common yet often misunderstood condition. While most treatments focus only on the painful joint, the...
Cortisone Injections vs. Class IV Laser Therapy: Short-Term Relief with Long-Term Considerations As a physical therapist, I often see patients struggling with persistent musculoskeletal pain—from knee osteoarthritis and tendinopathies to plantar fasciitis. Two common treatment options are cortisone (corticosteroid) injections and Class...
Why Cortisone Injections are Making Your Shoulder Pain Worse Shoulder impingement syndrome remains one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints seen in primary care and orthopedic practice. Subacromial corticosteroid injections have long been used to reduce pain and inflammation, often...
Functional Movement Assessment Prevents Pain and Injury Pain and injury can usually be traced to one or more movement deficiencies. Most develop slowly, starting with small movement limitations that go unnoticed until the body can no longer compensate. A Functional...
A Movement Screen Can Keep You Pain Free Pain rarely shows up out of nowhere. Most aches, stiffness, and injuries are the final chapter of a much longer story—one that starts with small, often invisible movement limitations. A movement screen...
7 Movement Problems a Functional Movement Screen Reveals We often go through life unconcerned about how well our body is moving, until pain stops us in our tracks. What if you could tell before your back, knee, or shoulder...
A Smarter Path Forward for Healing Low Back Pain Low back pain is rarely caused by a single problem—and it’s almost never solved by a single solution. Applied Functional Science (AFS) Physical Therapy focuses on understanding how the body...
You Don’t Have to Live with Stenosis Lower back pain comes in various forms, and one prevalent type is stenosis, derived from the Latin term for narrowing. Also known as arthritis, degenerative disc disease, or disc space narrowing, stenosis involves the...
Identify and Heal Sacroiliac Pain Lower back pain is a common ailment, and the second most prevalent form is known as sacroiliac pain or SI pain. Understanding the anatomy and symptoms of the sacroiliac joint (SI joint) can help...
Healing Disc Herniations with Applied Functional Science Physical Therapy A disc herniation can sound frightening. Words like bulge, tear, or nerve compression often lead people to believe their spine is fragile or permanently damaged. But the truth is, many disc herniations heal successfully—especially...
Pelvic Floor Therapists, Dr. Chupka-Fuson & Dr. Patterson Understanding Healing: The Pelvic Floor Process Understanding the Healing Process If you’ve been dealing with pelvic floor problems for a while, it can be hard to imagine a future without...
Pelvic Floor Therapy Means a Bright Future When you’ve been dealing with pelvic floor symptoms (incontinence, pelvic pain, etc.) for months, years, or even decades, it’s easy to start thinking, “This is just how life is now.” Maybe you’ve told...
In countries with data available, knee arthroscopy is the most common orthopedic procedure Data reviewed by an international multidisciplinary panel that included physical therapists Guideline makes a "strong recommendation" against the use of arthroscopy in nearly all patients with degenerative...
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) latest snapshot of arthritis prevalence, severity, and related physical inactivity reported in 2017 looks a lot like its previous one, based on 2015 data. As then, an estimated 1 in 4...
Should patients experiencing chronic, atraumatic shoulder pain for three or more months undergo surgery? A new paper recently published in the BMJ advises strongly against it. The paper’s authors summarized their evidence-based recommendations into a new Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG),...
To determine the benefits and harms of subacromial decompression surgery in adult patients with subacromial pain syndrome lasting for more than 3months. Download PDF File
Knee MRI is increasingly used to inform clinical management. Features associated with osteoarthritis are often present in asymptomatic uninjured knees; however, the estimated prevalence varies substantially between studies. We performed a systematic review with meta-analysis to provide summary estimates of...
The Food and Drug Administration has just issued what’s called a “Medwatch Alert” warning that Epidural steroid injections or “ESIs” for back and neck pain can be extremely dangerous. The alert says: “Injection of corticosteroids into the epidural space of...
Unlike drugs, orthopedic surgeries can be sold to the public before they undergo any rigorous testing to ensure they are safe and effective. Thus, millions of surgeries for knee, shoulder, and back pain have been done even without any research...
When it comes to diagnosing most back pain, MRI machines are like Monty Python’s medical machinery that goes “bing.” For back pain, MRI and X-ray are medical machines that make false alarms. They don’t always make false alarms, of course....
If you’re considering having spinal surgery as the final fix for your back pain, I’d like to help you to think again about your options.I’m a spinal surgeon and I want you to know that surgery is not your best...
When the Food and Drug Administration approved magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners in 1984, the machines seemed incredible. They offered an inside view of the human body, making it easier to diagnose disease, injuries and physical abnormalities. Today, they’re part...
The purpose of this study was to prospectively evaluate the prevalence of abnormal magnetic resonance imaging scans of the knees of asymptomatic subjects. A prospective analysis of magnetic resonance imaging to arthroscopic findings in symptomatic knees was also performed. Download...
Total knee replacement utilization in the United States more than doubled from 1999 to 2008. Althoughthe reasons for this increase have not been examined rigorously, some have attributed the increase to population growth and the obesity epidemic. Our goal was...
