Never read the book, but I always thought that the title described our profession well, here's why... As allied health professionals we are generally dealing with fewer black and white clinical presentations than our medical colleagues. That is, we are evaluating presentations like Myofascial Pain Syndrome, T4 Syndrome, Non-specific low back pain, Rotator Cuff Related Shoulder Pain, and Fibromyalgia Syndrome. Because of this, we are often balancing client quality of life decisions with the degree of intervention we provide. Tied up in this are difficult to tackle topics like lifestyle factors (e.g., sleep quality, smoking, healthy weight), health literacy, physical conditioning, psychosocial...

Cliches, but powerful... A picture tells a thousand words. Seeing is believing, which in this case is very concerning. One of the most common areas in which I am asked to provide a professional opinion is in regards to needling and pneumothorax or haemopneumothorax. The cause is poor or no technique and is usually due to a lack of specific training. If you learned manipulation of the thoracic spine, you would not then assume you have the skills to manipulate the cervical spine. Different anatomy, Different precautions. Different dangers. In much the same way practitioners, that have learned to needle supraspinatus are not qualified to move an extra couple of centimet...

This article combined data in the US from 3 sources; Sleep Cycle (sleep tracking app)US CensusCentre for Disease Control in the US to evaluate relationships between sleep quality/duration/snoring and various health metrics and diseases. I am not aware of such data gathering in Australia, but it does bring together several important health considerations that we can take on board clinically. The analysis helps to show that our physical, mental, and sleep health have multi-directional effects on each other. Those cities in which participants were experiencing good sleep had some similar characteristics; higher leisure timelower diabetes scoreslower obesity scores  Higher Leisure Time...

Whether  you are working within a government organisation or a private practice, a varying component of your referrals are going to be directed to you from colleagues and other medical practitioners. In the case of hospitals, there will be protocols in place about appropriate reporting content and frequency. But what about in private practice? How often do you write?What information do they want? What information do they not want?How do they want to be communicated with?How technical do they understand? Step 1.  Know Your Referrers In essence, I would suggest you do what we did. Firstly contact you main 5-10 referrers in person. For the most part this will require an appointme...

So you're a manual therapist health professional. Congratulations, it is an incredibly rewarding career. There are 27543 physiotherapists and 4998 chiropractors (plus 9097 and 1894 students respectively) in Australia. The graph shows the relative number of registered physiotherapists in Australia across 5 year periods. Given the average practitioner takes about 5 years to develop reasonable competency in clinical practice, we can break down their working life into two major epochs of 20 years each, so 25-44 years and 45-65 years. What becomes startlingly obvious, is that only a small percentage of physiotherapists transition from the fir...

  The Sham Challenge This Clinical Kit looks at issues surrounding acupuncture and dry-needling research from the perspective of sham interventions to create an effective control group. Medical researchers need a control group as a basis for experimental comparison. Typically as participants are enrolled in a trial, they are randomly allocated to experimental and control groups. The control or placebo group mimics all the intervention group's metrics (gender, age, background), thereby controlling for intervention bias or placebo effect. The control group either receives no treatment or sham treatment. In pharmaceutical trials, it is very easy to create a reliable control group intervention; have two pills, both the same size, colour and scour marks, with only one containing the active ingredient being tested. It...

Hi Visitor This is the first of two eZines, that focus on assisting clients presenting with complex neck complaints, by using a system of integrated solutions recommended by our guest presenter Dr.Shaun O'Leary. Here is the first part of Shaun's, 10 Handy Hints when Managing Chronic Mechanical Neck Pain When your patient complains of a 'heavy head', it is important to remember that without muscles, the cervical spine can buckle, under a mass of less than 1/5 the weight of their head. Bearing this in mind it is important to understand the anatomy of the cervical spine. During our training we are introduced to a wide variety of muscles and yet with the cervical spine, it seems there is always another...

Here is the third in this series of Red Flags - Tumor articles. The previous ones can be accessed via links;

• Red Flag Number 2 - Meningioma
• Red Flag Number 1 - Pancoast

A difficulty expressed by newly qualified clinicians when conducting their examination, is knowing what to do next. What do I mean? Well, we are told that we live in the "Information Age", but I think that we have well and truly roared through it. Basically every test, procedure or disease - our body of knowledge, can be found on the internet. All the information is out there in a variety of forms. In the same way a client is the internet - they have all the information. We are now in the "Synthesis Age." As clinicians, we need to type in the correct search parameters (know the correct questions) and be doing this in a logical sequence, thereby adding or subtracting...