JOSPT Insights

Health care practice is slowly transitioning from a paternalistic way of delivering care (doing to the patient) to a shared decision-making model (doing with the patient). Health systems, clinical professions and individual clinicians are at different points along the transition. As a process, shared decision-making provides a scaffold for the patient's values, preferences and circumstances to rec...

Nick Kane, the head physio at Essendon Football Club in Australia, brings our attention back to Australian Rules Football. Like in all Sports Corner episodes, he reviews the demands of the sport, the common injuries, and key things to keep in mind when designing and progressing rehabilitation programs with Australian football athletes. In today’s episode, we take a deep dive into the hard preseaso...

How do you approach evaluating psychological health factors when working with people in pain? Do you have an established process for screening? How about an approach to managing the psychological aspects of injury and health? Athletes say they would like psychological support, while many musculoskeletal rehabilitation clinicians feel ill-equipped to provide appropriate support. What to do?! Fortun...

In today's part 2 of an NMES masterclass from Dr Elanna Arhos and Dr Naoaki Ito, we're getting into the nitty gritty of how to support patients to get the most out of a very beneficial intervention. Drs Arhos and Ito, and their team have tested a mix of common stimulators available on the market today, and are here to share the results with us. Let them help you make an informed decision about you...

Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) hasn't quite had the coverage it deserves, especially when one considers the strength of evidence supporting NMES as a musculoskeletal rehabilitation intervention Today, Drs Elanna Arhos (Ohio State University) and Naoaki Ito (University of Wisconsin - Madison) are re-visiting how NMES is applied in sports clinical practice. Get the low-down on why you n...

Dr Robert-Jan de Vos, sports physician and associate professor at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, dives deep into all things Achilles tendinopathy. In part 2 of this series, Dr de Vos covers the multitude of options for treatment, outside of exercise therapy. Should you and the patient consider corticosteroid injections, PRP injections, heel lifts, shockwave, NSAIDs, or surge...

Dr Robert-Jan de Vos, sports physician and associate professor at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, dives deep into all things Achilles tendinopathy. As lead author of the Dutch Multidisciplinary Guideline on Achilles Tendinopathy (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34187784/), he shares the key messages from this in-depth review. In today’s episode, Dr de Vos covers the important...

Sports Corner is back for 2024! Today, we revisit ice hockey, and focus on acute injuries—preventing and managing them. Dr Joe Robinson is the head physical therapist for the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins. He skates into Sports Corner to explain the physical demands of hockey, the typical acute injuries he sees and how to prevent them, and runs through how the medical team responds during...

Does the thought of managing elbow pain leave you reaching for your orthopaedics textbook? Maybe you've got lateral elbow tendinopathy sorted, but how confident do you feel about managing elbow fractures and dislocations? Today, Val Jones, Clinical Lead Physiotherapist at the Sheffield Shoulder and Elbow Unit at the Sheffield Teaching Hospital Foundation Trust, shares practical advice to help you...

Did you know that calf injuries are one of the most common soft tissue injuries in team sports? How comfortable do you feel assessing and managing calf pain, especially designing and progressing a program to help someone get back to their sport? Today, Dr Seth O'Neill from the University of Leicester, joins us to blend the latest science in calf injury with high-level clinical reasoning. You'll ge...

Two (gentle) giants of physiotherapy/physical therapy research and practice join JOSPT Insights today. Associate Professor Peter Kent and Professor Peter O'Sullivan (Curtin University, Perth, Australia) share, on behalf of the whole trial team, the results of their RESTORE trial. Does cognitive functional therapy herald a revolution in how clinicians can support people to live well with back pain?...

Someone walks into your clinic with a sore shoulder. Are you dealing with a stiff shoulder? A rotator cuff problem? The acromioclavicular joint? Or something else entirely? Today, Dr Angela Cadogan (PT, PhD) - Specialist Physiotherapist and clinical consultant - is helping you hone your clinical reasoning in differential diagnosis of subacromial pain. Dr Cadogan shares her practical approach to di...

Welcome to part 2 of our masterclass with Dr Sam Bunzli (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia) and Dr JP Caneiro (BodyLogic Physiotherapy, Perth, Australia) on understanding, talking about and shifting the narratives we all carry about musculoskeletal pain. We are exploring the explicit and implicit messages that you communicate with your words and actions when you work with patients. Drs Bunz...

We're wrapping up the 2023 JOSPT Insights year with a 2-part chat with physiotherapists, researchers and educators, Dr Sam Bunzli (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia) and Dr JP Caneiro (BodyLogic Physiotherapy, Perth, Australia). In part 1, we discuss the way that patients understand pain. Dr Bunzli kicks off by summarising the best research evidence, and Dr Caneiro shares some compelling cl...

In part 2 of this series, we continue chatting about designing and implementing a rehabilitation program after cervical discectomy with Drs Justin Lantz, Jessica Evaristo and Joseph Derian. Today we work through phases 3 and 4 in the rehabilitation program: re-modeling and maturation occurring around 12-weeks after surgery. We cover nerve glides and how to dose them, the goals and areas of focus f...

Join a group of experienced orthopaedic clinicians as they review the background of anterior cervical discectomy and fusion surgery in a 2-part podcast series. In part 1, we cover who does well with surgery, the indications and surgical procedure, plus a deep dive into evidence-based pre- and post-operative rehabilitation. There's not much hard research evidence to guide your decisions on how to s...

Dr Jeremy Graber joins us to help answer the question: how often should patients with total knee arthroplasty come to rehabilitation? To answer this and more, we dive into the 2023 JOSPT article, “Expert Consensus for the Use of Outpatient Rehabilitation Visits After Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Delphi Study.” ------------------------------ RESOURCES Dr Graber and his colleagues led a expert consens...

What you can do to help prevent neck pain? What are the best exercise approaches? PhD candidate, Florian Teichert, and Professor Daniel Belavy, from The University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany, discuss which exercises and why they might work. We use their recent systematic review published in JOSPT as a launching point for the discussion. ------------------------------ RESOURCES To read...

How do you help someone manage cancer-related fatigue or get back to exercise after their treatment? Is it safe for someone with bone metastases to exercise? PhD candidate and recent Master of Physical Therapy graduate, Kendra Zadravec, and Professor Kristin Campbell (Department of Physical Therapy at the University of British Columbia, Canada) share their research and clinical expertise in develo...

Does the thought of managing elbow pain leave you reaching for your orthopaedics textbook? Maybe you've got lateral elbow tendinopathy sorted, but how confident do you feel about managing elbow fractures and dislocations? Today, Val Jones, Clinical Lead Physiotherapist at the Sheffield Shoulder and Elbow Unit at the Sheffield Teaching Hospital Foundation Trust, shares practical advice to help you...

Dr Casey Humbyrd—orthopaedic surgeon and Chief of foot & ankle orthopedics at the University of Pennsylvania—shares her expertise and insights on treating ankle sprains that are not responding to non-surgical treatment. Dr Humbyrd reviews ankle anatomy and her rationale for recommending surgery, how she performs a Broström repair, and explains how she works in close partnership with physical thera...

Do you work with young people with ACL injury? Well, you're in the right place! Today, Drs Chris Kuenze and Adam Weaver walk through the story behind creating a comprehensive normative dataset for knee function and strength outcomes. You'll learn how the project got started, and how you can use the information to help make even more informed clinical decisions. ------------------------------ RESOU...

A surfer walks into your clinic with neck pain…What do you do next? And why? Dr Lynn McKinnis expertly walks through when and how to apply the Canadian C-Spine Rule when a patient presents with neck pain, types of vertebral artery injuries, and tips for diagnosing and treating acute neck trauma. ------------------------------ RESOURCES Learn more about the specific case here: https://www.jospt.org...

Does the thought of dermatomes and myotomes, nerve trunks and nerve roots fill you with confidence or fill you with fear? Physiotherapist and neuroscientist, Dr Annina Schmid (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Oxford University), shares a checklist of what you need to know, and what you need to do, to nail your neurological assessment next time you're in the clinic. ------------------...

Tendinopathy is a common and often challenging musculoskeletal condition. A cornerstone of diagnosing and managing tendinopathy is assessing the problem well. In today's episode, Dr Myles Murphy (Edith Cowan University, Australia) shares a new patient-reported outcome measure for evaluating Achilles tendinopathy-related disability, the TENDINS-A (TENDINopathy Severity Assessment-Achilles). -------...