Ryan Nall speaks with KATU2 about how PT can work to treat long-haul COVID patients

News

By: Confluent Health
November 29, 2021

(KATU) — A knee injury or a shoulder tear will likely lead you to a physical therapy office, and now – so could COVID-19.

Physical therapists are working to improve long haulers’ functional capacity, much of which the novel coronavirus has hit hard.

Ryan Nall is a physical therapist with ProActive Physical Therapy. He’s worked with several long-COVID sufferers.

“I had a couple patients who had major symptoms, up to six months later, where they cannot even walk more than two to three minutes without having significant fatigue,” Nall explained.

Some of those he’s seen have been debilitated by the novel coronavirus. COVID-19 has robbed them of a life they once knew. Nall works to repair some of the damage.

“I had a patient with long-haul COVID a few months ago, and she just could not walk more than 100 feet or so without having significant breathing concerns,” Nall recalled.

The patient he is talking about was a nurse. Nurses regularly walk miles while on the clock.

Nall says one of the first things he does with a long-COVID patient is assess what their baselines are. He does three tests: the six-minute walk test, he checks the oxygen saturation of their blood with a pulse oximeter and he has the patient do the sit test.

The six-minute test is simple. It measures how far you can walk in six minutes. It’s a measure of functional capacity. Prior to COVID, the test was normally used for the elderly, those 60 and older. Now, because of the impact of COVID-19 is having on long haulers of various ages, physical therapists are using it to test people much younger.

Nall says the nurse he treated couldn’t even make it a minute in the six-minute test when she first came into the office.

“She got 31 seconds into the test and her oxygen level dropped to 60%,” Nall said, referring to her blood’s oxygen saturation. They had to stop the test right away.

That number is dangerously low. Nall says anything under 95% is concerning as people should aim to see something between 95-100% on a pulse oximeter.

“Some people with COVID are sitting more in the 90s now just because it has affected them long term,” Nall said, again referring to the pulse oximeter readings for some long haulers.

The sit test is also pretty simple. The patient just sees how many times they can sit up and down in 30 seconds.

After some rehab, Nall says the nurse was able to walk for up to 15 minutes with a healthy pulse oximeter reading.

Nall is trying to help patients like that. ProActive Physical Therapy is offering free screenings for long-COVID patients.

A study in the United Kingdom found that the chance of getting long-COVID is cut in half if the person is fully vaccinated.

See the news video here for more information.