You may be asking yourself, “Do I really need an athletic trainer?” The answer? A definitive “YES!”
If you have made it to reading this, there’s a part of you already looking for solutions to your health problems, concerns, and/or worries. And an athletic trainer can help!
How? Well, let’s look at exactly what an athletic trainer is and does for their clients.
By definition, athletic trainers are health care professionals who specialize in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. This means that an athletic trainer can do many things for your well-being! For example, they may help you find ways to prevent an injury from happening to you while playing sports, or even give you dieting and exercising tips on how you can prevent some diseases. They may be able to diagnosis an injury or health problem you have. In any case, it is an athletic trainers job to help you treat your pains or ailments and rehabilitate your injuries.
Now you may be wondering, “Diagnosis? Treatment? Is an athletic trainer a doctor?” The answer to this question is no, but athletic trainers will work with doctors to help you!
Studies have even shown that athletic trainers come to the same diagnosis as doctors 92% of the time! If an athletic trainer can help you, there are benefits to working with both health professionals instead of doctors alone.
What are the benefits? Doctors practice conventional medicine, while athletic trainers deal in functional medicine. Conventional is disease oriented and doctor centered, while functional is health oriented and patient centered. Doctors treat everyone the same and give diagnoses based on symptoms. Athletic trainers treat you as an individual and give diagnoses based on your health as a whole, taking into account not only bodily factors, but mental and social factors as well. Lastly, conventional medicine specializes on diseases instead of looking at the underlying causes of diseases like functional medicine– focusing on early detection instead of prevention.
Your next question may be, “Why should I buy into what athletic trainers are selling?” But that’s just it. Athletic trainers aren’t trying to sell you anything! They do their jobs to offer you hope, excitement, and freedom for your health. They want to help you set specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based goals and have fun with you while doing it. A goal without a plan is just a wish. Athletic trainers give you the plans to achieve your goals so that your health wishes become wellness accomplishments!
That is why your final question should be “When can I begin my journey with my athletic trainer?”
