How necessary is rehabilitation?

Depending on your pain levels, how long you’ve been dealing with an issue and how much time you have, rehabilitation can be a hard sell. Once your pain starts to ease, you may think it’s no longer necessary. Or you may simply feel like there’s not enough time in the day to add yet another set of activities to your routine. In either case, it’s important to remember that rehabilitation is about more than managing pain and can often be integrated with other activities such as listening to music or watching TV.

Rehabilitation is important because many of the injuries and pains that chiropractic treatments address took time to develop and may require strengthening, lengthening and retraining muscles to fully treat. For example, if you have lower back, shoulder or neck problems that took months or years to develop from poor posture or work habits, or a favorite hobby or sport, then it often takes more than a couple of treatments to really start reversing the effects.

While treatments will help reduce your pain and put you on the path to recovery, you need to improve joint mobility, strengthen muscles and improve your flexibility for the best outcome. Getting results takes consistent work over a period of time, so sticking to your rehabilitation plan is your ticket to a quicker recovery and reducing the likelihood of a future recurrence.