All Star Physical Therapy treats patients with variety of options

When stay-at-home restrictions were handed down from county, state and national government officials due to the COVID-19 outbreak, many people began limiting their trips outside, even for essential services.

But according to All Star Physical Therapy owner and director William Atkins, the full-service therapeutic office in Fallbrook has remained open as it was deemed an essential business, treating patients in a variety of ways – while making sure to do it safely.

"As an essential service, we just had to follow CDC guidelines for patients to come in and be safe and for our employees to be safe," Atkins said. "We've worked hard at taking histories of the patients when they come in the front door to make sure they haven't been exposed to the virus or been out of the country. We take temperatures, and we've been doing as good of social distancing as possible within the clinic.

"We're able to do that to keep people safe and still keep physical therapy going for visits so the patients would feel comfortable in a safe environment," he said.

Atkins received his bachelor's degree in physical therapy in 1981 from California State University Long Beach, was born and raised in Fallbrook and has served the community for more than 30 years.

An orthopedic certified specialist since 1996, Atkins has focused on treating musculoskeletal injuries and disorders. He is just one of several therapists in the office, specializing in everything from pediatric to geriatrics with various orthopedic and sports injuries.

Atkins said another way the practice can treat patients is with telemedicine visits.

"For people that don't want to come in and are fearful of coming in, they can shelter at home and we can do telehealth visits," Atkins said. "The best way is by using their computer. We can use the camera on their computer or their phone, so we can actually observe their exercises and give comments or look at quality of movement and things like that so we can continue to help them out."

For those patients that have a hard time with video technology, they are also offering phone visits and email programs.

"We're able to actually maintain some of their visits and they can continue their exercise routines through phone conferencing," he said. "Also, we can email them their exercise routines, send them video performances that they can look at and use to continue exercising."

Atkins said the office has been doing about 50% of their normal volume since the shutdown.

"Because almost all elective surgery has been shut down during this time, that's kind of slowed things down," Atkins said. "But as of yesterday, elective surgery was OK'd. We're going to start back up with typical things that come with physical therapy – total knee replacements, hip replacements, back surgery, anterior cruciate repairs, rotator cuff repairs – anything that's elective orthopedic that's been held off for six weeks is now going to start coming through the door again.

"Those do require you to be in the clinic because there's usually some hands-on component. Some things you really need your therapist to be there. That is starting to ramp up again, literally just in the last day or two," he said.

All Star Physical Therapy, which is accepting new patients and welcoming back patients who have paused their treatments, is located at 577 E. Elder Street, Suite I, in Fallbrook.

For more information, call 760-723-2687 or visit https://www.allstarphysicaltherapy.net. You can find them on all social media channels as well.

Jeff Pack can be reached by email at [email protected].