They have done much more harm to me than good. I started at ATI in West Roxbury about 3 years ago for a lumbar herniated disc I was hospitalized for. The pain was only in my back and the spine surgeon said I didn't need surgery. The physical therapist Elle was great at first, but before she left to work out of state I got put with a travel physical therapist and the PTA.
After a few months of PT here, I started to notice pain in my left hip. I had the physical therapy assistant Brandon that day and he said it was piriformis syndrome, even though as the PTA he isn't qualified to say what it is or isn't, but that's what Elle and the office and PT went with for exercises for me. Then a couple weeks later I went for a walk and it felt like my entire left leg was broken. I did not know this was nerve pain from my herniated disc, but ATI should have known this as herniated discs are common for outpatient physical therapists - and they should have realized that's what the hip pain was.
They kept giving me all these stretches and the pain kept getting worse and I could not be on my feet for more than 2 minutes without having excruciating 20/10 pain. It ended up spreading to my left labia too. I had another MRI and the herniation enlarged significantly and caused severe spinal stenosis and was compressing my nerves.
The following appointment I talked to the physical therapy manager Colleen and I told her the pain was now spreading into my labia and I was concerned about leg/back stretching exercises they were giving me. They already had my new MRI results and she, with physical therapy training was trying to tell me my spine (bone) itself it's stenosed "spinal stenosis, your spine bone" and I said "No, that can be one cause of spinal stenosis, but it's the size of the herniated disc compressing my nerves, my physiatrist (pain doctor) said this as well and that this is the largest herniated disc he had seen." I could not be on my feet for more than a couple minutes without excruciating pain and still had bad pain sitting and lying down just less severe for about 6 months I could barely be on my feet. I looked up the exercises they were giving me online and it said they all pull at your nerve root, which is not good for an enlarged acute herniated disc and stopped going to them. After my disc enlarged and caused radiating debilitating nerve pain in PT, I was then told by the surgeon I now needed surgery. I found a wonderful chiropractor that does noninvasive spinal decompression as I wanted to avoid spine surgery as much as possible, especially since it was due to getting worse in PT. This helped significantly, but I still have problems and it set me back a lot in both my professional and personal life. I would have been better off just resting and walking to heal than going to PT here. read more