Now Hear This
I've been a therapist for many years having graduated in the 1980s. I've seen things change. Trends have come and gone. In many cases what we do now didn't exist then. I've seen my profession grow to a major component in modern health care. I've seen good therapists, bad therapists and a few I'd call exceptional. But only recently have I seen this. Therapists who've stopped caring about what they do.
What has happened? When did we place money over providing care? When did we start choosing continuing educations courses because they were cheap and easy rather than to learn something? Why is it acceptable to pass off challenging, time consuming patients for the quick and easy ones? ( I'll have more to say on this one later.) When did hot pack, ultrasound and massage take the place of good old hands on? Certainly some blame lies squarely at the feet of the payment sources. More blame lies on health care facilities who value numbers over quality. Ultimately it is the individual therapist who makes these decisions not Medicare, administration or any other outside force.
This isn't everyone. There are so many good people out there who would do anything for a patient. But there are those who don't care. Or, maybe they just don't know any better. Ignorance is not an excuse. The ones who suffer are the same ones who depend upon us the most, our patients. If we're not going to help them, who will? Everyone takes the occasional cheap course or cuts a few corners. One of the buzz words for this phenomenon is disengagement. I have a few different ones: burned out, exhausted, fed up and indifferent. For those of you falling into option number four, I have a message. Get it together or get out. And please, take those therapists who only know one way of doing things and don't want to know another with you.