Physical therapy with myeloma

[Music] what is physical therapy and why should a myeloma patient consider it hi my name is Beth Travis and I'm a physical therapist physical therapy is a discipline that falls under the category of rehabilitation medicine the basic goal of physical therapy is to improve the patient's ability to move reduce pain restore function and prevent disability and I think it should be part of every myeloma patients journey what does a physical therapist do and what we do is we help individuals develop maintain and restore maximum body movement and physical function so what that means is we want to be there for you after you've had an injury or a disease to help you recover relieve your pain and prevent further injury or perhaps in the case of multiple myeloma deal with a chronic condition you can get physical therapy at any age or stage of your life and typically the tools we would use in physical therapy would include exercise hands-on care modalities and patient education why would a myeloma patient consider a physical therapy most important for myeloma patient is we use physical therapy to improve the quality of your life we want to improve your function reduce your pain and make sure that you don't become disabled by maintaining your fitness level what is an individualized assessment an individualized assessment is especially important in myeloma patients because of the lesions that occur every myeloma patients different so what we like to do in physical therapy is first listen find out about your myeloma journey and then we want to incorporate additional information like your lab tests and your imaging get an extensive past medical history and then we want to put you through an initial evaluation where we look at your physical function things like range of motion strength sensation coordination and then we want to combine that with further assessment looking at your functional ability can you roll around in bed can you stand up walk run jump so those are the type of things that we look at and when we're done with that we put it all together and develop a plan of care in physical therapy an initial evaluation you should set aside about an hour of time because it is a lengthy exam typically we like to see our patients for about four weeks and then reassess now during those four weeks with the treatments you're gonna be coming to physical therapy but you're also going to be doing a home exercise program we reevaluate at four weeks and we can reduce the frequency which can start off with two to three times a week but as you get better and more independent in your program it can be reduced to once or twice a week and as you move forward you can also get a reassessment anywhere along the way just to see how you're progressing or if you're having any problems and a lot of times with myeloma patients there are individual nuances and we'll need to address them as we go and we'd like to be there for you what is a plan of care typically a plan of care is developed based on the data that we've collected so we utilize typically flexibility to get motion strengthening to get more power we'll use different forms of strengthening it could be open chain or closed chain open chain exercises are exercises that are performed or the hand or foot is free to move closed chain exercises our physical exercises performed where the hand or foot is fixed sometimes with myeloma patient closed chain is better than open chain because open chain involves lifting weights whereas closed chain uses things like squats and push-ups which at times can be safer myeloma patients then will progress to aerobic training because we want to reduce your fatigue by improving your general fitness we use a lot of modalities in physical therapy heat cold electric water therapy is wonderful especially for myeloma patients because what it does is it helps reduce the weight-bearing forces on the body so it's a great way to get started who benefits from physical therapy just about everybody will benefit from physical therapy there are a couple of contraindications for example if you had a fracture of a long bone or some spinal cord compression we would probably not treat you for physical therapy at that time or have a more in-depth conversation with your physician typically we have a lot of special concerns with multiple myeloma patients especially with bony lesions how was my spine protected multiple myeloma patients are often at risk for a spinal fracture so what we want to do is stick with the concept of neutral spine where we maintain spinal position more in the middle not forward bent or flexed or too extended or bent backwards those type of positionings during exercise safeguard the spine my doctor didn't recommend physical therapy does that mean I don't need it we hope that your physician likes to but it's always okay to ask to have it included it is covered by most insurances and you really want to incorporate physical therapy as part of your myeloma journey because we want improve your health and especially improve the quality of your life so please keep us in mind [Music]