Jeff Worrell of Advantage Medical has created an intriguing website entitled “PT Talker”. The site focuses on business news and ideas for therapists by presenting podcast interviews with clinicians.

A number of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Jeff for his site. The interview, in its entirety, was posted late last week. The title of the podcast is “Mentor, Motivator, Educator, And Healer – The Role Of A Physical Therapist”. The interview can be found here.

As readers of this blog will know, my approach to health and health care is very client- and patient-focused. When speaking of the role of the physical therapist, our profession is at a significant crossroads. The future of health care – and the physical therapy profession specifically – lies in the first three terms: Mentor, Motivator, and Educator. It is the last word - healer – that proves troublesome.

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The Date: February 28, 2010. Canadians will remember it as the last day of the gold rush. Maybe that’s the song Neil Young should have played at the Closing Ceremonies. No, we’re not talking about the Klondike gold rush of 1896. This is the modern day Olympic gold rush. A record 14 gold medals in the Winter Olympics were mined by Canadians at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Canada may not have “Owned The Podium”, but they sure did “Own The Gold”.

The final day of competition saw the Canadian men’s hockey team defeat the United States 3 – 2 in overtime. It was only fitting that the beloved hockey team would get the last gold to set the record. They won’t call it “Miracle On Ice”. That won’t be necessary, because to most Canadians, that hockey win wasn’t a miracle, it was more of a birthright. No, Canadians will call it “The Day The Country Stood Still And Breathed A Collective Sigh Of Relief” – or something similar. The movie title might have to be revised, of course. But hockey is only one part of this Olympic story – albeit a big one.

Why is all of this gold medal stuff so important to Canadians? Winning lots of medals is relatively commonplace in the United States. They won the most medals overall (37) at this Olympics. And besides, the stereotypical view of Canadians is the mild-mannered neighbors to the North that never utter a peep, always play second fiddle to the United States, and certainly don’t ever sound – nationalistic. Or proud. At least not in public. Oh, and they never talk about the War of 1812 – but that’s another story.

But as Bob Dylan once said, maybe the times they are a changin’.

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Marathon running has become a rather strange social phenomenon over the past decade. It is one that I can’t say that I fully comprehend given the history of running in this country.

There was a time not so long ago – maybe 30 or so years ago – when training for a 5K was the departure point for new and experienced runners alike. This was during the initial “running craze”, when many people turned to running as a way to get up and move and get active. After you ran a few 5Ks, it was a natural progression in thinking to run a 10K. Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t. Then, you might decide to progress to a half marathon. You rarely had people going into the sport at the marathon end of the spectrum.

Somewhere along the line, running a marathon entered into the collective psyche of the couch potato.

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Thursday February 18 was a strange day in Austin. I had a client who was 30 minutes late for an appointment, telling me he thought there had been some kind of “big wreck” on one of the city’s major thoroughfares which had shut down traffic. That certainly isn’t something out of the ordinary in Austin. But as is turns out, it was a more than just a big wreck. Someone by the name of Joe Stack had crashed his plane into the side of a building. It was a sad, crazy day in Austin. An act of terror? Here? Really? Please, wake me up. Really?

But is it “terrorism”? It seems like there are a lot of people debating the semantics of this. Why, I am not quite sure. Terrorism is, by definition, “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons”. Terrorism knows very few bounds. It is a pretty broad definition.

You know that the issue of semantics (and fear) has grown to epic proportions when you have an Austin American-Statesman headline that reads “Was attack an act of terrorism, rage or spectacle murder”. We really need to categorize this? Really? Any act of violence like this will “intimidate or coerce societies or governments”, especially in their response to the tragedy. Can we not just leave it at that?

This goes far beyond an issue of semantics. It goes deep into our psyche, our beliefs, our values.

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