With increasing concerns about the costs of medical care and the desire to lower costs, look for less and less coverage of physical therapy treatment regimens.
The latest study from the Annals of Internal Medicine compared: Chiropractic care, medication regimens, and home exercise regimens for treatment of acute musculoskeletal neck pain.
In this study…..Chiropractic care and Home Exercise Regimens were better than medication alone, and were equal to one another.
Given this finding, it is just a matter of time until insurance companies refuse to cover physical therapy or chiropractic….in favor of home exercise regimens.
In this study, the home regimen was preceeded by 2 episodes of physical therapy ‘instruction’ by a trained therapist, but rather than allowing 18 sessions of physical therapy, I think you will see more and more of these ‘home based’ therapy regimens covered, while standard physical therapy and chiropractic care are reduced.
