Throughout my study I have reached points where I thought physiotherapy was straight forward… and the principals of it are! However the body as we all know is complexed, lucky for us there are levels to its complexity. You have the ‘if something is short then stretch it, if something is weak then strengthen it’ basics, then of course you ask if a muscle physiologically short (hypertonic) or physically short (contracture), or is a muscle genuinely weak or is it just inactive? Or maybe it is weak because its been inactive for a while due to another issue within its kinetic chain?!

OR is this weakness from a nerve injury/pathology?

EXAMPLE 1:
Imagine reading a whole section in a library… you would feel pretty confident with your new knowledge right? Well imagine reading every book in that library… to feel confident you would need to easily be able to link all the sections/genres so they all relate to each other explicitly.

EXAMPLE 2:
It took many years for scientists to map out the human genome. A good break through. But how long will it take us to ‘map’ out the human body behaviour which not only has a structure, but also a function… and to complicate things further, those functions can adapt…and to complicate things further, those adaptations communicate to each other…and to very lastly complicate things further… those communications (sensory-motor) operate subconsciously both in the brain… and on a segmental level.

Happy days for us hey!

TAKE HOME MESSAGE:
Not knowing or understanding everything is a good thing. It means you know a lot, and your not trying to fool yourself (or others) into thinking you know exactly whats going on all the time.

There are many ‘quacks’ you see on the net and in a business not far from you who are very happy to join the dots themselves when things don’t make sense… well my message to those people is What-are-you-doing? … you just gave up!

Being a physio is committing to life long learning… a beautiful thing! If you can get your patients better in < 6 sessions and call them after a few months to hear they are independent and doing great thats brilliant. But its important to question everything and be able to explain WHY you do what you do, WHAT effect you are trying to create in the tissues and why you think it is better than other options.