There is always a certain degree of excitement at this time of year. It's the start of a new semester of teaching, which is always an adventure regardless of how many years you have taught the course. Ten years into teaching functional anatomy and I can say it is still a fresh slate on the first day of class.
It is also the start of college football season. With college football comes the thought - admittedly faint right now - that fall weather will soon be here. Call me an optimist I guess - and a sweating-profusely-in-August one at that.
This episode of the Rhubarb Report takes us back in history, and looks ahead to something that hopefully won't create it.
For many people, New Year's Eve rings in the start of a new year, new goals, and a rejuvenated existence. The new year is filled with the prospects of growth and new experiences that lie ahead.
To me, New Year's is just another arbitrary day. Your birthday, however, is truly the start of a new year. I have always found my birthday to be a time for reflection, a time to learn from the past and present and embrace the growth of the future.
My birthday this year was no different. With that in mind, here are a few not-so-random thoughts from my day of reflection this year. Maybe some will resonate with you.
When I listen to clinicians, I sometimes have to wonder how Homo Sapiens ever survived the past 250,000 years. With the clinical minutiae that exist these days, it's a wonder that we haven't become extinct long before now.
Walk into any of countless chiropractic, massage therapy, and physical therapy offices around the world, and you will hear the woeful tales of asymmetries and mal-alignments. You will hear of the maladies of the kinetic chain and the hypothetical relationships and regional interdependence from great toe to TMJ and all points in between. You will hear descriptions of two degrees of varus at the subtalar joint which, since it has been uncorrected for the past 40 years, has now created micro-trauma that has evolved into your back pain, your headaches, your arterial insufficiency, and your eyes being divergent.
I have no idea how we managed to survive the onslaught of those two degrees. I suspect the species is doomed. Who needs an ice age when the scourge of two degrees of varus is upon us?
It's not just a Republican thing. And it's not just a Democrat thing.
When you get right down to it, consumer access to physical therapy could - and should - be an issue with bipartisan support nationwide. Both sides of the aisle should absolutely love it for very different reasons.
But it becomes readily apparent that they don't - at least not consistently from state to state. With a mid-term federal election cycle and plenty of state-wide elections soon to be upon us again, it would be helpful to understand why.
In health care, there is much talk of control. One of the biggest issues is controlling the spiraling cost of care.
In the same breath, we have become transfixed by outcomes for any given episode of care. This is thought to help control costs – the costs that are faced right now, what I call the upstream costs.
But over the long-term, the control we need to discuss is locus of control. This is the control that will ultimately provide health care with true, epic reform.
August is always a month of anniversaries and times of reflection. I am not quite sure why, but August seems to have accumulated a lot of life events, seemingly more so than any other month.
This year has been no different. It has been a nostalgic couple of weeks since my last installment of the Report. As a matter of fact, this week marks my 23rd anniversary of moving to Austin, inching me ever closer to having lived as many years here as I did in Canada. Just for the record, the day of the 50/50 split will be July 29, 2015, assuming that Austin is still home. I don't see that changing any time soon.
In this episode of the Rhubarb Report, I go back in the time machine for a few of those August moments in time. Gretzky, Erving, and Peralta - any of those names ring a bell?
It may have been one of the worst value propositions ever made. I know you've heard it before -
"Hands-on care is quality care".
I have heard it more than once, be it in a clinical environment, educational program, or on social media. What makes this scenario even worse is how the public has been snowed into believing it. Clinicians have, over time, skillfully trained the public to believe this. While doing so, clinicians continue to perpetuate a myth - that quality care is inherently related to the laying-on off hands.
Allan Besselink, PT, DPT, Ph.D., Dip.MDT has a unique voice in the world of sports, education, and health care. Read more about Allan here.