About the Practice
Lisa Sattler Physical Therapy has evolved over the years to become more whole person oriented. It became clear over time that in many cases what was needed to improve a person’s pain in one area some other things also needed to be addressed if the goals were going to be met.
Lisa believes in results. Lisa will spend extra time with people to make sure all of the information has been explained, or the exercises are clear and the patient is doing them correctly. Most importantly Lisa is not distracted by other patients when working with you, Lisa sees only 1 patient at a time.
Lisa has recently recognized the changes in health insurance have been causing patients primary care visits with their doctor to be shorter since doctors have gotten busier. Lisa helps the patients to formulate questions for any upcoming visits a patient has so that the shorter time the doctor spends will be informative. This helps the patients get better too if they have a productive visit with their doctors.
As health care evolves overall, Lisa has set a goal to evolve her practice in order to continue to meet the needs of everyone.
About Lisa
Lisa Sattler, PT, DPT, MSc, has been a physical therapist for over 25 years. She has a masters degree in science from Long Island University where she graduated magna cum laude and a doctorate in physical therapy from Stonybrook. Lisa is also certified in musculoskeletal diagnostic ultrasound.
Lisa has been working with patients with a variety of injuries however, she has specialized in neck / shoulder/arm/hand pain syndromes and TMJ disorders. She wrote a program of treatment for RSI and taught many courses with Dr Emil Pascarelli about this injury.
Lisa is also working with breast cancer survivors, showing them post surgical stretches and exercise.
Lisa lives in NYC with her daughter who is a college student in Massachusetts.
Ultrasound Enhanced Evaluations in Physical Therapy
Being certified in musculoskeletal ultrasound and having an ultrasound machine in the office, I can provide some increased information for some cases of patient pain. In all cases if an ultrasound photo appears to indicate an abnormality the patient takes the photo to their MD for review.
The top photo, photo A, was a lump behind a patient’s knee. We could clearly see on this scan it was a classic bakers cyst, which is a fluid filled sac that some people get behind their knees. This patient was able to show this to her doctor who was then able to offer her the usual treatments for this condition.
The bottom photo, photo B, was a patient with knee pain who was only responding for short periods to exercises. Since this patient was only in his 20’s at the time with no history of knee trauma and no visible knee swelling, I decided a scan might have some information. We were able to see a very clear double line in his left knee. This occurs when calcium is abnormally depositing in the joint. He was able to show this photo to his MD for further evaluation.
In both cases the ultrasound was an effective tool to provide information about the patients problem that was a contributing factor to their pain. These are only two examples, there are numerous other cases. As the insurance companies continue to cut costs and deny benefits this type of informal scan can become even more useful. It is not always required or needed but helpful when something can be done differently as a result of the scan.
