Regaining the full use of a body part after an injury or illness can take a long time, and for some, the journey is never over. This is because standard medical and physical therapy practices often aren't the best solutions to mobility problems. Fortunately, there is a well-established branch of medicine that is much better at this task: Sports medicine.

The reason sports medicine is so much better at physical rehabilitation is that it was originally developed to help professional athletes. This gave it a focus on getting patients back to full functionality and doing so as quickly as possible. Traditional therapies, on the other hand, often have basic functionality as a goal and no particular emphasis on how fast that functionality is obtained.

As stories have come out about how a major athlete has returned to professional play only weeks after suffering injuries like broken bones, the general public has realized that there is no need to stick with slow, partially-effective standard therapies. Instead, people have begun to seek practitioners of sports medicine New Haven and elsewhere so that they, too, can enjoy regaining the full use of an injured part in short order. In turn, sports medicine practitioners have realized that they don't need to restrict their practices to top athletes. Many no longer restrict their practices to athletes at all.

At first, it can seem like this difference in effectiveness is almost magical. In reality, the results are a combination of different goals, different physical therapies, and patient motivation. A sports therapist will provide exercises and treatments meant to restore the full range of motion and full strength to the parts in question. These exercises won't "take it easy," but instead, push the part as much as is safely possible in order to bring about results quickly.

It's important to know that patient motivation is critical to results. Top athletes are willing to put in hours of work on their exercises – as many as their doctors allow. The average patient should expect results to be a bit less speedy since most people don't want to spend all day exercising.

That said, sports medicine can still deliver results that far exceed those offered by traditional therapies thanks to the emphasis on total recovery. This makes the sports version best even for non-athletes.