This weekend I taught a continuing education course with three other therapists. It took well over a year for us to organize the content, create the handouts and visual displays and market the course to get as many participants as possible. It was a fun process to figure out the best way to engage the participants and relay the most important ...

Anyone who reads my blog with regularity knows the last year has been a struggle for me. I lost my beloved job. I was fired for being ethical. I encountered more than my share of unethical and self-serving people. During all of that, I hung on and kept going to work. Every so often I made a difference to someone, which kept me going. For the ...

During my first clinical rotation as a student (which was a short, four-week orientation), my clinical instructor often gave me the task of finding research articles or handouts to give our patients. I distinctly remember working with one patient who had Parkinson's disease. After one of our sessions, we went over an article on Parkinson's ...

Now that I'm home from CSM, I've had an opportunity to process all of the information. Most of the presentations were excellent. Those that weren't purely theoretical had a common theme. We have to maximize what we do because we're spending less and less time with patients. We have less time to spend because there isn't money to pay for our ...

SAN DIEGO -- Just like my fellow ADVANCE blogger Lauren, I'll be attending the APTA Combined Sections Meeting in San Diego. CSM happens this week so I'm already in my hotel. I've registered and picked up my materials. I attended my pre-conference workshop on item writing. I'm ready for things to begin. Unlike most of my fellow therapists, the ...

Reading Jason Marketti's blog last week reminded me of a discussion we're having here in Texas. It's called RC-3 and is an amendment to the Texas Physical Therapy Practice Act. It proposes unlicensed individuals such as athletic trainers and massage therapists be used as PT extenders. These extenders are to provide care as directed by the physical ...

Last week, I wrote about my experiences teaching my first CEU course. I mentioned how much work it was but didn't go into details. It took me nearly four months to finish, including two months of working at least an hour or two every night. Now I'm going back and revising the content. I'm beginning to think that is an ongoing process. In the ...

As PTs and PTAs, we went through enough testing in school and yet we had to pass one more test to get that magical piece of paper from the licensing board. The problem is that to get that license to practice, we did not have to show any skills to the state board demonstrating that we knew what we were doing. Maybe the licensing board trusts the ...

''Spinal manipulation is not designated as being under the exclusive domain of any one specific profession or group of practitioners.'' So says the APTA; however, the position they take with the PT assistants is that we should not be allowed to perform joint mobilization (any grades). So effectively, the APTA is saying the PTA is not a group of ...

I have been following along with the reports from Danielle Bullen, Rebecca Mayer and Lisa Lombardo on the goings-on in Tampa last week. I find the outcomes interesting and validating. One of my contentions with Vision 2020 is that it seemed too isolating. That seems to be holding up now. As a profession, we are finally starting to realize that no ...