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Today I am going to talk about your Physical Therapy practice and the demand for osteoporosis treatment services.
Low bone density affects not only the elderly and frail. It affects young and active people who want to maintain their independence. Clients are looking for, and should expect, a Health Professional that can not only prescribe an effective exercise program but also has a good understanding of the medical management appropriate for their condition.
What does this mean for your Physical Therapy practice? It means that you need to learn more about how to treat clients with this condition — regardless of age — and complete the training necessary to treat this population.
Continuing Education Course
I encourage you to check out the Building Better Bones online course for Physical Therapists, Physiotherapists, Kinesiologists, Athletic Trainers, Occupational Therapists and Physical Therapy Assistants.
Over 12,000 health professionals have completed this course.
“The Working with Osteoporosis and Osteopenia course and website have both been great resources that I find simplifies my approach to providing safe and appropriate exercises for the variety of patients that I treat.” — Justin Mathew, BSc PT, Registered Physiotherapist, Bronte Physiotherapy, Oakville, Ontario
Your Physical Therapy Practice
Hi. Welcome back to day five.
Like you, I’ve taken many courses, and sometimes I take a course and I go, “Interesting information, but not really for me.” I encourage you if you were even a little bit stimulated by the osteoporosis information, to go on and do the online course. Even at the end of it, if you’re thinking, “Well, the osteoporosis thing isn’t quite for me,” then you’re going to have to integrate it, at least a little bit, into your practice because your clients with co-morbidities, at least a quarter of them, are going to also have low bone density. But if you’re finding that still it’s not a big area for you and you’re not as excited as I am in it, at least you’ll know where to refer your clients to. Like you, my clients love when I refer them to appropriate professionals or appropriate sites to help them with solving their problems.
In my 25 years as a physical therapist I’ve attended many workshops and a lot of great workshops. But there’s such a difference between workshops that are given by clinicians and workshops that are given strictly by researchers. Although by researchers we get good information, but it’s not always applicable to our clients. We try to get little nuggets out of it that we can use on Monday morning. In my workshop and with the online course, I provide you with lots of nuggets, lots of information that you can use and apply right away.
In 2000 I went on and did my Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialty through the National Strength and Conditioning Association. That’s really been very helpful for me in building and delivering the MelioGuide program. Interestingly enough, I was just at the sports conference put on by the American Physical Therapy Association 2010 on team concepts, and even within this group of therapists, we were still teaching…There was a three-hour workshop just on delivering, how do we teach squats? How do we teach lunges? How do we teach proper chest presses?
All of this type of information is what I make very clear to you through the training. So that you’re left with, not just great exercises and a great way of teaching the exercises for your clients with low bone density, osteopenia or osteoporosis, but for all of your clients. Clients with osteoporosis, osteopenia or low bone density deserve to be taught an exercise program by well-trained professionals, not by people who like to exercise and only have a two-day weekend certificate.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to the five days of tutorials. If you learned something and you’re excited about what you learned and you want to learn a little bit more in regards to osteoporosis and exercise, I encourage you to sign up to the online course. In the online course you’re going to get 15 hours of both screencasts and video content.
…provide you with a lot of education beyond the first 15 hours whether it’s in the form of book reviews, whether it’s in the articles and blogs that we write and looking at research and summarizing research for you. I also provide summaries and information on the conferences that I attend around the world related to osteoporosis, osteopenia and low bone density.
Thank you for completing Working with Clients with Osteoporosis and I invite you to join the over 12,000 Health Professionals who have completed Building Better Bones.
In good health,
Margaret Martin
Physical Therapist, Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist
MelioGuide
Physical Therapy Continuing Education
To learn more about how to Physical Therapy Continuing Education, visit my page dedicated to Physical Therapy Continuing Education.
Comments
August 6, 2016 at 2:54am
Mamta Patel
Very good information received
Thank you