Injury resilience is a new term that I have learned that will replace the term I’ve been using injury prevention. Injury resilience is changing my frame of thought around physical therapy.
The importance of changing your mind
I want to share this with you because as a healthcare provider, updating my knowledge is important so I can serve you better. Many health care providers have a difficult time discussing when they change their views as people might blame them for something that went wrong in their care even if the health care provider did the best that they could at the time with the information they had. I’ve seen this going on during the pandemic because at the beginning, we were told to not wear a mask. However, we were later required to wear masks because of the new data that came out. This caused a lot of confusion for people, particularly those that don’t understand the scientific method.
For some people, changing your mind means that the thinking you had before was really wrong. For me though, changing your mind is updating the information you have so you can update the way you are responding to the world.
Preventative Care In Physical Therapy School
In Physical Therapy school, we learned about techniques to do preventative care. That term is used a lot in health care and in the fitness industry as well.
To make you understand better, prevention in these industries means doing activities to avoid injuries, sickness, and anything that might cause harm to your body.
Understanding And Realizing You Can’t Prevent Everything
As I ponder on preventative medicine, I realized that you can’t prevent everything. You can do activities but you cannot prevent an accident, you cannot prevent cancer, and sometimes you cannot prevent an injury.
While you can do activities that make your body stronger, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to prevent any harm to your body.
So, I think the problem with using the word prevent is that when you are doing the right things, eating well, and doing things to decrease your stress, but you still get sick or injured, you might ask yourself, “What was the point of doing all those activities if it was just going to lead here?”
You may also identify as a healthy person and when you get injured or sick, it is more difficult to accept because you feel like you’ve done all the things to prevent such from happening.
Changing The Term From Prevention To Resilience
By doing this, you will think that your body will become stronger and healthier when you do the right things to take care of it and you can equate this to becoming more resilient to injury and to sickness. Rather than completely preventing it from happening, injury resilience leaves space for people regarding the things that are out of their control like your environment, your genetic code, traumatic accidents, and etc.
Resilience is really a better way to think about it because through this thinking, we can prepare our body to be the healthiest it can be and it gives us the edge when recovering once we get injured or sick.
So, to those who do everything right yet something still happens, know that you did your best and you will bounce back to a new normal. When you already did the work, it’s easier to be consistent again. So if you get injured or sick, remember that you’ve got this because you are resilient.