Changing Lives is Better than Changing Symptoms

Patients come to outpatient orthopedic PT's largely because they hurt bad enough that it is impacting their life somehow, or keeping them from doing something they love. As a result, pain/symptom focus is often frontloaded in terms of importance, especially early on during a plan of care. Furthermore, physical therapists are generally pretty good at positively affecting a patient's symptoms. Even a PT in an unrelated field has a large toolbox filled with ways to help a patient in pain to feel better for a certain period of time. Creating symptom change that lasts is even relatively straightforward, providing we are not reintroducing the patient to the issue that caused their pain. Sometimes the symptom is

even improved enough temporarily that the individual is able to return to the painful activity, though we know it is only a matter of time before the problem returns.

The difficulty comes when we take into consideration movement patterns, tissue load tolerance, enduring flexibility, and actual strength deficits. We may see a patient with patello-femoral pain and are able to drastically improve symptoms via taping, shoe wear, bracing, and possibly a few mobility exercises. The patient's pain may even be non existent upon presentation in the clinic. It's crucial that we recognize that these are vital parts of the process, but unless we've truly empowered the patient to make the above bolded changes, the patient will likely have short lived results. Our goal should be to build resiliency in our patients, not only make the patient feel better right now.

The topic of how to build resiliency is a much more complicated matter, and is literally the ideal that the profession of physical therapy is built on. Additionally, we all kn

ow these things as physical therapists, but when a patient comes in after three visits feeling great, it can be a difficult sell to explain that the work is not done yet. A recent systematic review on subacromial shoulder pain asserts that such shoulders should be managed for 12 weeks (Pieters et al. 2020). Super interesting to think about, and how much better our patients would be with 12 weeks of focused care, though that's a topic for a different day!

At Evolve, our mission is to help outpatient physical therapists solve problems just like this in their every day practice. We believe that by making these changes in people, we find the most fulfilment as therapists, and ultimately avoid the possibility of burnout. Maximizing our patient's goals achieves two critical objectives: It helps our patients in a manner crucial to their happiness, and provides us with the fulfilment that we sought when we entered the physical therapy profession! Stay tuned for more information on how to keep our patients engaged and affect the key aspects of lasting physical life change. Subscribe at the evolveptedu.com homepage to avoid missing out on any of these key points!

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