Pain Management and Healing with WellFit Rehabilitation & Aquatics

WellFit Rehabilitation & Aquatics in Westlake, OH offers physical therapy to people of all ages who are experiencing discomfort from illness or injury, including those recovering from a surgery. Their onsite SwimEx Therapy Pool gives people the option of undergoing land and water therapy treatments. The facility also offers dry needling, which is similar to acupuncture but reaches the muscles on a deeper level to facilitate healing. We sat down with owner and physical therapist Jonathan Schauss to find out more about what they do and how they support our local community.

Finding the Support You Need

We've all been there, whether it's working out in the yard and pulling a muscle, rolling your ankle walking off a curb, or some other incident of injury that leaves you in pain. For some people, long-term pain is a problem. Perhaps you've been dealing with back or neck pain for more years than you can count, or an old injury never fully healed. Whatever the case, WellFit Rehabilitation & Aquatics welcomes people with acute or chronic pain to schedule an appointment to start feeling better. In fact, they recently started accepting walk-ins when possible!

The Benefits of the SwimEx Therapy Pool

Exercising in a water environment is a great way to get a good workout while minimizing strain or pressure on the joints. As Schauss shared, having a therapy pool at the WellFit facility was a natural choice: "It's a fantastic modality for a lot of people that have difficulty exercising on land. ... For example, if someone had a total hip replacement, a total knee replacement, a shoulder surgery, the pool is a great modality. [It's] easy to get into, easy to get out of. We have a lift chair if we need to use that for someone to get them into the water. ... The pool can be anywhere from no resistance, like a regular pool at the YMCA... but our therapy pool has a big turbine in it, which actually can generate a current, a resistive current, and the client is working against that resistance[.] We can control whether that's very mild or get it going so fast that Michael Phelps couldn't even keep up with the current!"

The WellFit staff can help to guide people in undergoing a healthy exercise regimen to heal strained or injured areas of the body using the SwimEx Therapy Pool. "There [are] different exercise stations within the pool--because it's specially designed just for physical therapy--for the patients to do leg exercises, arm exercises, back exercises, whether that's as simple as walking all the way up to aqua-jogging or actually running in the water on those variable speeds that we can set the pool at."
 

Dry Needling for Pain Relief

 

The dry needling treatment is effective for people with a variety of conditions, though it is unusual to find a physical therapist who specializes in the painful jaw condition known as TMJ (temporomandibular joint dysfunction). "We can use the dry needling pretty much anywhere that there's a muscle and a trigger point in the body. It works great for the neck and back muscles, leg muscles... I do specialize in treating TMJ patients also, which is kind of rare, and we can do the dry needling to help get the jaw muscles to relax to open up the jaw space so patients aren't experiencing as much pain in the TMJ joint, which is a very painful condition."

Preventative Maintenance

In addition to their pain management therapies, WellFit Rehabilitation & Aquatics also offers nutritional counseling and support with an ongoing exercise plan through their personal trainers. "The long-term question," said Jonathan, "is how can we keep the pain away and how can we empower the individual to maintain [their wellness]. We like to empower patients with not just the exercises but with lifestyle changes[.] ... You get good nutrition in [and then] the body has the building blocks for good DNA [and] healthy cell replication. You can [lead] a more active, fit lifestyle and be stronger."


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Here at HandyPro, we make your well-being our priority. Our interview series goes hand-in-hand with that effort and we hope you find it helpful! For more information on how we can help make your home a home for life, visit us at www.StayAtHomeModifications.com or call me (Brian Pritchard) at 216-212-7531.

If you'd like to learn more about WellFit Rehabilitation & Aquatics, you can call 440-250-8895 to schedule an initial consultation, or visit them on the web at www.WellFitRehab.com.

To listen to our full conversation, please use the audio player below...