Weekly Q & A for the 16% October 27,2019 Podcast
I would caution you against trying to say, oh, this is a sports hernia protocol. I don't think those things exist. I think we have to treat the humans. I can't pronounce this name; it looks like A F H O O G S. So however you pronounce that. This is a student question. So this is exciting. Do you have any advice on handling the current DPT education knowing that much of it is no longer best practices? So that's a really, really strong question. I like this a lot. First, let me throw this out: in physical therapy, there is no such thing as best practices. It's impossible. We're dealing with complexity. At best, what we have are what's called emergent practices. So we don't know what will be the best choice. What we have to do in a complex situation is intervene, then reassess. So you have what is presented—that's our evaluation. We provide an intervention and then we reevaluate for the outcome, and that guides our practice. So that is an emergent type of practice, and so there are no best practices. So right away that's in favor of the PT curriculum in a way, and that they're doing the best that they can. They're trying to provide you with elements of education that they think are reasonable and necessary. Most of the curriculums have to teach a certain way because there's a board's exam that they have to support, which is unfortunate. But I would also default to Max Planck's quote in regards to science progressing one funeral at a time. And so there are people in charge who are driving these curricula. I don't know; my Latin is kind of weak. So they're driving these curricula and they have to do the best they can. I get to talk to some of these academic people regularly just because I have a student every semester, and they are going to pickle too. There are things they have to teach that they don't want to, but I think it's going to be a matter of practitioners like yourselves who will eventually take power. And rather than doing it as we have always done, I would hope that you would start to try to change those things. As a consumer, as a student who is paying for an education, it is also your responsibility to ask questions. And I think that's something that unfortunately gets squelched in academia: that the instructors understand there are things that don't necessarily apply in the real world anymore, but they have to teach them. And so they encourage students not to ask the difficult questions or they're incapable of answering them, just because of the environment they're teaching in, which is unfortunate, because I think when the student is paying an absorbent sum of money, they deserve to get what they pay for. So what I would offer you as a piece of advice is to continue to educate yourself outside of your curriculum. Take continuing education courses as you're allowed to, and you get discounts, which is really nice. But I would also encourage you to try to learn as much as you can with the understanding that there will be information in conflict. And so what this does provide is a very powerful concept called an earned opinion. So when you can argue multiple sides of anything, that allows you to have an informed and earned opinion, which gives you the capacity to see things from multiple sides and allows you to problem solve much more effectively. So let's not look at this as a negative that you're stuck in this curriculum. Let's look at the curriculum as one viewpoint and then this expansive amount of information and education available to you, which will provide you with this earned opinion that eventually will again give you great power in regards to how you intervene with your patients.
physical therapy educationevidence-based practicecontinuing education