Is Your Therapy Job a Literal Pain?

Physical Therapists, who typically help those struggling with pain, seem to be experiencing it themselves, and their jobs may be to blame.

A recent study has found a relationship between Physical Therapists who experience musculoskeletal pain and their career, namely those with larger patient loads, more hours worked per week, and performing more manual therapy interventions.

The study, which polled Physical Therapists in Spain, revealed that 49.4% of respondents reported moderate-to-significant levels of low back pain in the last 30 days, and nearly 60% had also experienced neck pain in the same timeframe. Upper back pain was the third most commonly reported issue, with 36.1% of respondents indicating they had recently experienced it.

The data revealed a correlation between low back pain and treating more than one patient at a time, working more than 45 hours per week, and working in a seated position. However, the study also found that Physical Therapists with more experience, namely more than six years of experience, were less likely to experience shoulder, low back, and elbow/forearm pain, and that those with 15+ years of experience were found to have lower odds of pain in those areas, as well as lower instances of neck pain.

Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Pain: Defining Something That is Sometimes Indefinable

How do you define pain? Do we need a new definition?

from Evidence in Motion

How do you define pain? Do we need a new definition? This is a thought question recently published in Pain by Amanda Williams and Kenneth Craig in November of 2016. The current definition of pain found in the IASP Taxonomy is: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”

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Disclaimer: The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.

Pain: Everything Works, but Nothing is Effective

Treating pain is challenging, but doing what we have always done will not move us to better care with these individuals.

from Evidence in Motion

When treating patients, some therapists love their treatment of choice and share their testimonials of how it works. While other therapists love to bash that treatment of choice and share the research on how that treatment has not been shown to be effective. I don’t even want to begin the laundry list of “tools” in the “toolbox” that PTs seem to pile up course after course when learning to treat their patients in pain. My hope is one day we can move past the methods (tools) of treating an individual in pain and understand the principles that can help. After attending #APTACSM 2017 in San Antonio this year, I continue to wonder if many therapists struggle with how their methods/tools fit into the principles of pain neuroscience.

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