Proving the Physcial Therapy Profession
As a physical therapist I am often asked by my patients, “Why are you doing this exercise?”, “How is this going to help my injury?” Based upon my schooling, experience, and current research I am able to confidently respond to my patient’s inquiries. But is there enough evidence out there to be 100% sure your treatment approach is the best for each individual patient and will show successful outcomes? Within the past decade, the physical therapy profession has put more emphasis on evidence-based practice, not to discredit the theories we all once learned and still use in our everyday practice. The community and physician practices seem to be in agreement with this movement. Recently in a New York Times article titled Treat Me, but No Tricks Please , the author discusses PT treatment for a sport’s-related injury and states:
When I asked Dr. Irrgang for studies showing what worked, I was a bit surprised. To put it kindly, they left much to be desired. Researchers would mix treatments — stretching and massage and orthotic shoe inserts, for example. If patients said they felt better, it was impossible to know why. Some of the studies involved as few as four participants. And the researchers did not always assign subjects randomly to one treatment or another to see which one worked better.
While we hope that our clinical reasoning leads to proper treatment choices and execution resulting positive outcomes, let’s take it a step further and follow the steps to prove our choices through concrete evidence. The Allied Health Research Instutute is a great organization that is dedicated to assist the profession in just that. One of the principle objectives is to “create a central data repository to collect and analyze clinical outcomes for the purpose of establishing industry and academic-supported, evidence-based practice patterns.” As therapists, let’s dedicate ourselves to showing through theory, experience and EVIDENCE the importance of Physical Therapy.
- Jill
