“My back is disintegrating.” “My deep neck muscles are too weak to hold my head up.” “My SI joint is out of place” I am less than a year into my practice as a PT and these are just a sample of the things I hear on a regular basis. I’m sure none of the […]
More from: Physiotherapy
The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Iceberg
I attended the first half of a 6-day Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Immersion course at the end of January. The second half is taking place at the beginning of November. The purpose of the course is to be able to offer CBT in a brief context while knowing when it may be necessary to refer […]
Logical Fallacies 101
School is supposed to teach us to think critically. Sadly, I think it usually misses the mark. I often hear people, who are probably quite bright and well-educated, make logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are flaws in reasoning. The problem is that on the surface, they seem to make sense! It’s only when you stop and […]
How far should we go with providing pain relief?
So, patients want and expect pain relief. Should that be our end goal then? Do whatever we can to relieve pain? It might not necessarily be what brought them to us (perhaps it’s their disability levels), but when they do come to us, they want pain relief. The question that I struggle with still is […]
Research Review #3 – What do patients expect when they come to see us? A qualitative perspective
For this blog post, I read Patient Expectations of Treatment for Back Pain: A Systematic Review of Qualitative and Quantitative Studies by Verbeek et al (1). This was another one of those studies that I came across for a school assignment but didn’t make the time to critique/read properly. I wanted to know how qualitative […]
Moving Forward Together: Harmonizing Indigenous Wellness in Medicine and Health Practices
The following post is a reflection I contributed to, along with three other physiotherapists, after attending a conference on the Six Nations reserve. We wrote it for the CPA Global Health Division’s monthly e-blast and they were kind enough to let me re-post it here. Thanks to Miriam Beatty, Katie Gasparelli, and Corey Kim for […]
Research Review #2: Why do patients come to see us?
Someone challenged me with this question in the past. I think this is a great question because our treatment should be tailored towards what the patient wants. I think the most common belief among therapists and patients themselves is that patients come to see us because of pain. If that’s true, then our treatment should […]
Course Review – Reconciling Biomechanics with Pain Science
I attended Greg Lehman’s Reconciling Biomechanics with Pain Science course again at the beginning of October and it was a great refresher! The purpose of this post is to summarize my take-away points and discuss how this course has and will continue to benefit me. Take-away points (in no particular order): The human body is […]
Research Review #1 – Comprehensive physiotherapy exercise programme or advice for chronic whiplash (PROMISE): a pragmatic randomized controlled trial
In an effort to keep sharpening my critical appraisal skills, I am going to start a research review series where I choose one article to summarize and discuss in each blog post. In each post, I will summarize the study’s methods and results, discuss its strengths/limitations, and talk about how it may affect my practice. […]
Reducing the Risk of Recurrent Ankle Sprains (Part 2)
Alas, I must finish what I started! To recap this cognitive exercise that I started over a year ago: Use of unstable surfaces (e.g. wobble boards, Bosu balls) are popular in the rehabilitation of ankle sprains I think that these exercises are not very specific to the tasks of everyday life or sports as we […]