Top Story Create username. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without prior written permission is forbidden. Contrary to therapeutic mythology, all care that occurs in the water is not essentially identical.
Clinicians make use of as broad a spectrum of treatment options in water as they do on terra firma.
On land, therapists offer patients the sum total of their knowledge as health care professionals. Instead, they describe it as McKenzie extension work, muscle energy techniques, mechanical traction or spinal stabilization. In water, aquatic therapy practitioners use the buoyancy, viscosity, hydrostatic pressure and other unique properties of water to construct new techniques. Since water provides a therapeutic environment much different than land, it is unusual for therapists to merely take land-based treatments and place them into the pool. It is much more typical for therapists to either significantly modify existing land-based treatments or to perform techniques that were specifically created to be used in water.