Our Approach | biosportsnw

Biosports Northwest Approach to Physical Therapy

One-on-one session with your physical therapist

Your initial evaluation is typically 60 minutes for orthopedic assessment and 90 minutes when including video gait analysis. Subsequent treatment sessions are 55-minutes, one-on-one with the same physical therapist every time. Every minute counts towards your recovery.

Detailed history taking

Each patient brings unique circumstances and often multiple layers of events that led to your current issue. We take time to discuss and understand your history in depth.

Establish your clinical goals together

Successful treatment is achieved when a patient and a therapist are working towards common goals. The Biosports NW treatment model ensures a close working relationship between you and your therapist.

Clinical-evidence based treatment

We emphasize clinical reasoning. This means your treatment plan is based on the clinical information that we gather during our assessment. Our treatment plan often includes hands-on therapy, exercises, movement retraining, symptom management strategies and orthotics. The therapist will re-assess effectiveness of the plan along the course of your treatment.

Movement assessment

The cause of your persistent injury is often related to how you use your body when you are moving. Our assessment has strong emphasis on the biomechanical relationship between body parts. This is called the regional interdependence model. In order to investigate how your body parts interact with each other, your therapist may videotape you performing various functional motions, such as walking, balancing, squatting and running. Your therapist will watch the video with you and provide the interpretation of your movement pattern. The video analysis helps us to identify deficits in mobility, stability and possible weakness.

Strong hands-on skills

Our therapists are trained in hands-on skills to restore functional movement and mobility. Manual therapy is one of the great ways to restore function.

Home exercises programs are essential

Every exercise you are prescribed targets specific dysfunction that we have identified. We use our sessions with patients to teach, modify and progress your home exercises, utilizing equipment that patients have access at home. The improvement happens every day since you are able to perform your exercises at home.

Visual feedback from movement video

Seeing is believing. You will watch your movement video with your therapist and she will discuss the findings with you. Visual feedback is the first step for changing the movement pattern.

Orthotics Therapy

How your feet contact the ground in daily activities and exercises impacts sound body function. Orthotics are one of the tools we use to improve body alignment and overall biomechanics, and to decrease feet symptoms. We perform video movement assessment to determine if orthotics should be part of your treatment plan. We will also explore the appropriate options including custom orthotics, over-the-counter shoe inserts, proper shoe wear, or modifications to your existing orthotics. If we determine that custom orthotics would help with achieving your goals, we will design orthotics based on your history, assessment, shoe style and biomechanical video analysis. We will combine the evidence based reasoning and art of touch to design your custom orthotics.