TOS Basics: Regaining Control with Physical Therapy

with Steve Taljakowski, PT, MPT, OCS, MDT

https://www.toseducation.org/video-op...

https://www.tosmri.com/thoracic-outle...

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hey this is dr scott warden the tos guy and today we have one of our most viewed contributors steve talakowski the famous physical therapist in california who has taken over the peter edgelow program today's talk is about regaining control with physical therapy and the invest program steve it's great to have you back and i look forward to your talk as usual hey thanks scott thanks for having me back it's um it's been a while since i've had my last presentation but i want to thank the viewers who have uh reached out to our group and uh locally i've had some people who've seen the videos and have come by the clinic and i've had some people that have contacted me by email and i've been able to do some uh consulting and sessions online so i appreciate that and i'm learning uh how to do this uh it used to be this bib in the clinic and i get referrals from physicians and now things are changing so i i really appreciate the support um i've been a pt for 28 years now and i've been seeing thoracic outlet patients for i think almost 24 years of that and the first 14 years i worked with peter aglow in the same clinic so that's where i got my experience uh treating thoracic outlet patients but being a therapist i i've seen a lot of different patients i don't just treat thoracic outlet i've seen spine patients i'm a mackenzie certified therapist and uh but treated everything from kind of head to toe and you know some injuries are pretty straightforward you know you have a knee injury or shoulder injury sometimes it's a sprain or a strain and you you know you time do some exercise and recover and if it's even a little bit worse and maybe you need to see a surgeon generally uh those outcomes are pretty good but what we're talking about is uh thoracic outlet which kind of falls into that kind of chronic pain category and there are other injuries that are also chronic pain and i don't want to um characterize like which problem is worse than the other from what i've seen but uh in my experience uh thoracic outlet can be a pretty devastating injury now of course it ranges from mild to severe so uh there is a spectrum there but i'm just going to share some of the experiences that people have told me described to me over these last 24 years and for a lot of people it's just

hey steve um we're actually not getting your audio or video right now

can be agonizing if you're lucky enough to be able to still be working um that's about all you've got is the energy to go to work other people have reduced their hours and in some cases a lot of folks have just been unable to work and if you're unable to work then that means you're the person home and uh that means uh if you have children you're taking into school well sometimes just driving 10 15 minutes is more than enough or too much any more any trips longer than that you usually need help you know a family member or a friend making breakfast is just the simple basics cleaning the house doing things as simple as

sweeping the floor washing dishes you know cleaning the bathroom a lot of those things are just too much and they just get let go they don't happen and then there's the sort of daily fatigue from not sleeping well enough and taking naps that don't really restore anything and then dinner comes in who wants to make dinner it's hard to cut vegetables lift up a pan so that's usually again simple food delivery or have somebody else do it when the evening comes and check some emails maybe watch tv and even that's hard sometimes being on a computer for more than five minutes is too much and then the day starts over again and i didn't even mention the uh impact on people's relationships with their partners their family their friend and then just getting the feeling after a while after six months a year or longer people wondering like well do you still have this thing like what's going on you know and all the while it seems to be getting worse so the reason i'm bringing this up is what i feel is has happened is that tos has taken control it's taken control of people's lives again it's a spectrum but in some cases it's taking complete control and so my talk today is to talk about some of the principles of how to regain control with the invest program that's the angelo neurovascular entrapment self-treatment program and of course that falls under the physical therapy category so i'm going to start with the um with the presentation so if uh verb can start that