Special Tests Can Be Special
Healthcare providers have a love/hate relationship with orthopedic special tests. Some seem to be really useful while others seem not to hold up very well to scrutiny. Much of these conversations seem to focus...
Category: Diagnosis
Learning From Experience
“Much learning does not teach understanding.” -Heraclitus The mind works like a human Bayesian reasoning system. “Dammit! I’m not reading this! BAYES?! DON”T MAKE ME LEARN SOME KIND OF MATH!” Easy, dear internet user....
Because You Know I’m All About That Base
“This is a common pattern: people who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.” – Daniel Kahneman I have...
Practice Template
One of the great things about the modern PT student is their level of education. Current programs, with the occasional unfortunate exception, do a pretty good job giving a proper foundation of the scientific...
Placebo-Fu
“An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.” – Henri-Frédéric Amiel Ah placebo! Along with natural history and regression to the mean, it is one of the positive non-specific effects of...
Is pain what brought the patient in? Kind of, but not exactly…
Many times when I’m discussing placebo and specific effects, physical therapists will say, “The patient doesn’t care. They just want less pain. We should give them less pain even if it’s temporary and the treatment...
Baby and the Bathwater
Adam Meakins (please follow him on Twitter) wrote a recent post about therapists getting a little too focused on the psychosocial components of pain forgetting that there can be and often is a biological...
Understanding Hip Joint Pain in the Young Adult
I’m going to write a really quick overview of my understanding of the young adult hip joint (the joint itself, not the region). Why? Well I’m kind of considered an expert on it for...
Appropriate Treatment Good; Inappropriate Treatment Bad
Ok. So you know that I don’t like the idea of defining the world as “Good Things” and “Bad Things”. I also generally don’t like politics and advertising. Both have the one goal of...