Combined Sections Meeting

Hi Jimmy.  I'm glad to see that you're interested in PT!  First let me tell you that the profession is very intellectually stimulating and I would challenge the person who told you otherwise to assess their current perspective.  

Yes, we do a lot of functional mobility with people (which in itself is so very important), but it's more than walking a patient down a hallway.  If you are good at your job, you're doing a biomechanical assessment of their gait from head to toe, figuring out intervention strategies to make them more efficient/independent, and making critically important decisions about where they'll go when they're out of your hands.  If you are good at your job, you'll get to send someone home to their family rather than to another hospital facility.  And that's just one aspect of our jobs.

I hope you get the point.  Physical Therapy is what you make of it. If you choose to be a sub-par clinician who does not utilize current evidence or advanced assessment and treatment skills, you may not think the job is exciting.  But if you are willing to address every patient case as its own and not provide a cookie cutter intervention, you will always find new problems to solve and new ways to help people (which is the most important part).

I hope this helps!  If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.  

Dear Lauren, I am an aspiring Physical Therapist but I heard from many people that physical therapy can be, in their words, "boring" as in an inpatient setting the therapists must "walk with the patients to improve mobility" and that the profession is not "intellectually stimulating." I would greatly appreciate it Lauren if you can offer me your perspective on these frequently heard statements. Thank you. Your admirer, Jimmy