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Physical Therapy

Decent Essays

Working as a physical therapist in the Philippines, I was used to having a rehabilitation doctor order a series of tests for different cases before they are seen for physical therapy. For example, for a patient for low back pain to rule out differential diagnosis, a doctor would order an X-ray, MRI etc first which could take days to weeks before physical therapy commenced.
So, going in my practice as a physical therapist here in the US, my thinking is to put all the “responsibility to the doctors” (Marewski, & Gigerenzer, 2012 p.78). I look at a doctor’s referral for physical therapy and I make sure to look at all the X-ray results, MRI results, history, lab work etc to get a better idea on the clinical presentation of a patient. Initially, …show more content…

One of which is regardless of training and knowledge, the decisions that I make would be based on “cognitive bias” (Klein, 2005 p. 781) One of the pitfalls that Klein mentioned in the article is “representativeness heuristic” (2005 p.781) which is correlated to what I mentioned in the previous paragraph about previous experiences. I have had an experience in the past wherein a toddler who was scheduled for physical therapy was refusing to stand and walk in the lobby prior to our PT session. The patient’s parents were also unable to determine what exactly happened at home. I decided to cancel our therapy session for that day and informed the parents that the child needs to be seen by a doctor immediately. The patient was seen in the ER and a leg cast was applied. However, after a week, the patient returned to our facility for a scheduled speech therapy session without a cast. The patient was walking on her own and was in no apparent pain distress. After talking to the doctor over the phone, it was established that based on the initial X-ray results, there was a fracture present. However, another X-ray was done which revealed that there was no evidence of fracture. I, too, would suspect fracture based on what I know in theory. However, based on Klein’s article, one of the rules of good decision making is to “remember that you are wrong more often than you think” (Klein, 2005 …show more content…

For us to do that, we have to take into consideration “heuristics” (Marewski, & Gigerenzer, 2012 p.81) which is a balance of our knowledge, the information we get from our patients and being aware of our own biases which can help us as physical therapists make an improved clinical decision that would benefit our patients and their quality of

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