Biofreeze Reduces Physical Therapy Dropout Rates

Even the best treatments in the world cannot provide benefit if the people who require them will not, cannot, or do not receive them. Next to high co-pays required for some treatments, one of the primary reasons that patients in need of physical therapy do not receive it is the amount of pain physical therapy itself produces.

Self-discharge is a term referring to instances in which a patient receiving rehabilitative therapy discontinues treatment without the consent of the professional providing it. This article discusses the way in which the analgesic Biofreeze can plays a role in reducing the likelihood of physical therapy patients to discontinue therapy.

A patient may decide to discontinue therapy for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they do so because they cannot afford the treatment; sometimes they will self-discharge because attending therapy becomes tiresome, dull, or inconvenient; others simply lose confidence in the capacity of physical therapy to help them if they do not see significant results immediately.

Not only does self-discharge potentially reduce the quality of life a patient can achieve, but it hurts the professional status of the practitioner. For this reason, it remains a worthy topic of consideration for all physical therapists.

A practicing physical therapist named Timothy Tyler began to suspect that one of the predominating reasons for the self-discharge of his patients was the fact that, in the short run, physical therapy itself caused pain. It could seem counter-intuitive, or even ironic, to chronically suffering patients that the practice with the very goal of reducing pain, in an immediate sense, does the opposite.

Tyler decided to study the trend of self-discharge in his own practice between the years of 2007 and 2009. Out of the total number of patients who signed up for physical therapy, he found that a total of 6.5% of patients opted out of therapy for reasons other than those given by therapists.

Beginning in 2010, Tyler began prescribing Biofreeze Pain Relieving Spray as part of an at-home care regiment to all patients at his clinic who suffered muscle pain. He instructed patients to apply the spray three times daily and at equal intervals to the exclusion of all other similar types of pain treatments.

The results of his experiment were highly favorable. He found that the inclusion of Biofreeze to the care-strategies of afflicted patients drastically reduced the frequency of self-discharge. In 2010, he recorded a 75% drop in self-terminations in comparison to the previous year.