Midtown Occupational Health is Denver’s leader in integrative care for workers who have experienced a work related injury.
How is the Midtown Occupational Health approach unique? Instead of working with each provider separately, such as going to your physical therapist with one practice and a massage therapist at another, each individual’s plan of recovery is tracked within our office, and everything is coordinated within one set of patient notes. That benefits the patient, because everything is coordinated toward recovery.
What does a treatment regimen look like?
First, when a patient comes in to see us we start with an assessment of their injury and current capacity. We identify treatments for two phases of recovery, first healing from an injury and second, conditioning and treatments to get back to pre-injury levels of performance.
That means we will work with the patient and their previous medical records to identify pre-injury capacity. This could come from primary care notes, specialists the patient has seen, or pre-employment physicals, depending on the jobsite criteria. The goal is to identify where the patient started out, so the team can put together an effective plan of action to help the patient get back to their pre-injury level of performance.
Treatments can include some or all of the following:
Massage – massage supports healthy blood flow and the resilience of muscle and fascia, the material that holds muscles together. Deep tissue massage can also break down scar tissue which shortens the muscle and reduces its ability to remain dynamic under work related pressures.
Physical Therapy – physical therapy focuses on strength, flexibility and conditioning to recover physical performance after an initial injury has healed. A physical therapy program can also emphasize movements that align with the worker’s anatomy to help prevent re-injury by training the worker in movements that support the way joints and muscles naturally function.
Dry Needle – this treatment is derived from acupuncture, but with an influence from sports medicine. Focused on addressing trigger points and muscular release, dry needling draws from anatomy to identify where local and referred pain is coming from. The needles help to release banding, tightness and imbalances that can lead to further injury or pain.
Chiropractic – a physical therapy approach to chiropractic doesn’t just focus on joint realignment. It works in tandem with physical therapy and other treatments to help the patient get out of pain and to get the most out of their conditioning and physical therapy work.
Ongoing Capacity Testing – in a work related injury situation, readiness to work is measured through testing. The worker’s compensation claim is based on getting back to health and performance so the worker can go back to his or her job. Our team utilizes capacity testing built on international standards to provide an objective measure of performance. By working with consistent metrics, we are able to adapt treatments toward more consistent and reliable results.
Within the Midtown Occupational Health approach, the foundation is worker health, the structure built on injury recovery and performance, and the outcome is greater consistency, faster recovery times, and lower cost as compared with ER visits and primary care physician managed recovery plans.
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