Sports
Westborough PT Office Hopes Boston Marathoners Stop By
South County Physical Therapy is offering free 15-minute injury assessments after the race.
South County Physical Therapy’s Westborough office staff hope Boston Marathon runners stop by for 15 minutes after completing their 26.2 miles.
The Oak Street office will offer free 15-minute injury assessments -- “a complimentary, quick meeting with one of our physical therapists” -- to anyone bringing their Boston Marathon bib in before Memorial Day, Executive Director Eric Cardin said Wednesday.
The physical therapist will ask the runner for a short history, and to describe their training program, he said. The physical therapist will “write up the injury assessment and send it with the runner to the doctor,” he said.
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“We compressed a normal evaluation,” which runs 45 minutes, Cardin said.
“What comes of it is I either say, ‘Try this. Give me a call in two weeks if it’s not better’ or ‘This is pretty serious. You should see a doctor’ Or, we say, ‘You really should come to physical therapy, because we can help this.’ It just gets our people in front of people that have a need.”
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Cardin said South County Physical Therapy began offering such compressed assessments a few years ago, “as a way for us to get to know the members of the Westboro Tennis and Swim Club, because we had an office inside the club.”
“What would happen is I would end up talking to a lot of members about just the little aches and pains, nothing that they couldn’t get to,” he said.
About a quarter of those receiving such assessments go to physical therapy. and “probably 75 percent of them go on with the recommendation that we give them, and then they come back later for something else,” Cardin said.
Cardin said he runs often.
“When I’ve run a marathon, you don’t always feel great afterward. That’s normal,” he said.
“But after a while, sometimes things don’t go away.”
Cardin said some typical marathon-related injuries include the IT Band, which “goes along the outside of your thigh, (and) comes into the knee. Runners can get an irritation there for a whole host of reasons”; patella tendinitis; and Achilles tendinitis.
“We have a couple of runners sort of in the frantic mode right now where they’re battling little injuries,” Cardin said.
“It’s funny, because we can all understand their urgency, the time they’ve put in, trying to piece them together for the big day.”
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