Course Description:

This class is intended to assist the clinician in maintaining their primary focus on enabling patient independence from the medical system including the need for PT.

The stratification of patients can be effectively summarized as those requiring intervention, rehabilitation, management or prophylaxis. The recent trend to evidence-based practice has brought along with it an unintentional and inappropriate bias toward the intervention phase.

This class will be biased toward the rehabilitation, management, and prophylaxis phases while demonstrating how exercise can be integrated with manual therapy techniques to become a therapeutic intervention. There will be a complete focus on therapeutic exercise and appropriate education for the patient.

With the decreasing reimbursements in physical therapy and the burgeoning business models of physical therapy delivery, exercise has commonly been generalized and delegated to ancillary staff. The exercise concepts will require physical therapist knowledge of anatomy, pathology, chronology and attainable patient goals through the application of genuinely therapeutic exercise.

Basic principles of facilitation will be integrated with the use and elimination of gravity and body weight directed toward the patient's functional needs. There will be an integration of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, manual resistance applied during the flow of manual therapy techniques, gravity assistance, gravity resistance, and external resistance. Additionally, the progression towards realistic home exercise without sophisticated equipment will be integrated.

This class is willfully designed to be efficient with your time as well as effective with developing, improving or mastering your skill set. All enrollees will receive the didactic portion of the class before the actual class day allowing time for absorption before the physical interface. This will ideally liberate the class to spend the majority of the time together in a genuine “hands on” refinement of skills to be assimilated into their present matrix.