Erin is a Physical Therapist at the Drayer Physical Therapy Institute in Tuscumbia, AL. Whether seeing a pediatric or geriatric patient, Erin is charged with rehabilitating their joints so they can quickly resume the activities they enjoyed before surgery or an accident. Working predominantly with athletes, Erin uses a lot of body weight exercises to rebuild strength in the joints and get her patients walking again!
Transcript
My name is Erin Pounders, and I am a physical therapist. We can treat anywhere from birth, up until the end of life span. It just depends on your setting in which you work in I have worked in pediatrics, which is normally birth to about 18. Depending on how cool you are I guess. And then you have an outpatient clinic, which is more of your athletes, or your sports type injuries. Sometimes it's joints replacements depending on how far out, and you have an inpatient setting as well. Which is more initially post surgery where you've had joint replacement, ACL replacement, anything like that. And in addition to that, sometimes we see patients pre-surgery to get them ready for surgery, so that they have a better rehab after surgery. Predominately we see athletes that have had an injury on the field, they're just trying to rehab or avoid surgery. We have had some athletes that are post surgery. We see a lot of total joint replacements, such as knees, hips, shoulders. We see just wear and tear surgeries that are rotator cuff, and meniscus, and things like that are my common injuries at this point. When you get into my clinic, I'm going to assess you. You're going to have to see me first. Or someone of my credentials first, and then we will do an assessment. We will see how you're moving, how much strength you have, whether or not you walk with a different gate pattern than somebody else does. Whether or not you're using a walker, whether or not you're using a cane. And then from there we talk to you about, What you were doing before surgery? What are your likes? What are your dislikes? And a lot of times we ask those questions, or get information on those questions without having to ask it directly. Because we're building a relationship with you. A lot of my job is through exercise. We teach exercise principles. We teach movement patterns, and so it's designed to teach you how to do the movement in the best and most safest way for you. So we use a lot of body weight training actually. It's not really anything fancy or anything that we have to have on site. We do have some weight training equipment on the facility. But we're using our hands to help you move your joint, to move the joint in a way that will increase the motion that you have in a joint.
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