Hi
name is Christian Lowe and I'm about to begin my third year as a physical
therapy student at ETSU chose to be a physical therapist improved pursue
career and physical therapy because as a high schooler I was a patient alot and
I really appreciated how much my physical therapist works to build a
relationship with me and get me back to my competitive status as an athlete but
now that I've been on this road to becoming a physical therapist I found
that the key term for physical therapy i think is versatility and variety because
there's so much that you can do with physical therapy you can work with
patients as young as infants just born to geriatrics is old is you might have
seen settings are also very different and there's a huge variety that you can
work in the first one that I won't talk about is the hospital setting also known
as the acute care setting and in the hospital you'll work with patients who
have had surgery so it could be a planned surgery where they had total
knee or total hip or an unplanned surgery from a traumatic event such as a
car accident or fall you also work with patients who have had illnesses such as
heart attack or a stroke and you're gonna be working with them for a short
amount of time to get them to be ready to transition to the next place that
they may go or transition home the next setting that a patient may go to after
the hospital would be an inpatient rehab or neurological centre and in the
neurological centre or inpatient rehab sitting they'll be getting therapy for
three hours or more a day and that can be beach or occupational therapy and
you'll see patients that have had any number of disorders where they are
neurological deficits or musculoskeletal injuries such as a hip fracture or post
a total hip surgery and this is where you really working hard to get them back
to home because you think they have a good possibility of getting home they
just need more rehab so from there they can transition if they aren't able to go
home
they can transition to a skilled nursing facility or go straight from hospital to
the skilled nursing facility and this is where they have less than three hours
usually they can't handle three hours a day so they'll be the same disorders but
they may be more disabled in their disability and they can transition from
a skilled nursing facility to a long-term care facility or they can
transition home now once a patient makes it home they have a couple options they
can be in an outpatient facility if they do need more physical therapy and an
outpatient setting and it's probably what you would be familiar with you have
had an experience with physical therapy because this is where athletes go if
they've had an ACL injury or maybe a baseball player for his MCL so you can
see that you can also see patients who had a stroke or higher level but still
need a little bit of help you can see when care anywhere here or in the
hospital and then you can have physical therapists who specialize in specific
joint so you have specialists in back pain you are specialists in shoulder
pain in knee pain and then you have specialists who are manual therapists
and they are very hands on with what they do so there's a lot of ready in the
outpatient setting another area that a patient can go to would be home health
which they actually don't go anywhere they stay at home and the physical
therapist would come to them and this is for patients who it's not safe for them
to get out of their home maybe they're elderly and they can't drive anymore and
they don't have a way to get to physical therapy, in this case the therapist would
come there and work with them in their home which is a very noble thing to do I
think wound care is a specialty for physical therapists where they can work
in any setting and be specialized in wound care whether someone who's had
burns or a traumatic wound or a chronic wound due to diabetes and she'll help is
another area that physical therapist can work in and in this area and we work
with patients who have been injured on the job and this can be from back pain
neck pain or fractures or we can work
not in the rehab setting but more in the preventive setting which is where we
teach them proper technique whether that be lifting technique which is very key
or how to lay out their desks so when they're sitting there have proper
posture and decrease the amount of pain they're having a context is another
specialty for physical therapists to use its a great tool that you can use in any
setting to help your patients get back their quality of life because that's the
key for physical therapy we want to give quality of life back to our patients and
so aquatics can be used for Pediatrics and it can be used for geriatrics and so
we're using that water environment to help our patients
pediatrics is a very large specialty area because Pediatrics covers
everything from congenital disorders such as cerebral palsy, muscular
dystrophy and Down syndrome to musculoskeletal disorders to any
neurological deficits that come on dramatically such as a brain tumor or
brain injury and pediatrics you work considered pediatric is an infant 221
but in pediatrics you can have a cute setting in the hospital and outpatient
setting in that outpatient setting you can work with any number of pages
academics and research is another area that physical therapist will work in but
that's usually later in the career win they've decided I'm really interested in
this area and i wanna find the new techniques that are out there
the new test measures that were gonna use and we need a generation of physical
therapists to teach and mentor the generation physical therapist that are
coming next
some specially certifications for physical therapists are cardiovascular
and pulmonary geriatrics neurology orthopedics pediatrics
sports physical therapy and women's health now these specialties you can do
a fellowship or residency program after you get your DPT and you'll get so many
hours in these areas
working and then you take an exam and have that specialty I've heard the
morning letters behind your name the better it is these specialties give you
more letters and a lot more experience. A little history about physical therapy,
we started
in the late 1800's early 1900s with the polio epidemic that left thousands of
children disabled around the same time ww1 in the early nineteen hundred's left
thousands of soldiers coming back home with these terrible injuries and
disabilities and so the demand for people to help rehabilitate them was so
high that physicians could not take care of it on their own so they started this
physicians assistant role that transitioned into physical therapy as we
know it today so it started around that time the military did a great job of
training and certifying these individuals to be rehab specialists and
then in the nineteen thirties we had our first bachelor's degree in physical
therapy, but it didn't really solidify and become the education that we needed to be
until the fifties and then the transition to make it into a master's
degree started in the seventies and solidified in the nineties and then by
1993 we had our first doctoral program in physical therapy and that's where we
are today and is the vision for the American Physical Therapy Association
for 2020 is to have all entry level doctor or entry-level physical
therapists to be doctoral level physical therapists and currently
there's 227 physical therapy schools in the US and all of them offer physical
therapy program I DR physical therapy in all of them but one so we are very close
to that goal the requirements for a Doctoral of Physical Therapy program, you
have to have a bachelor's degree and a lot of people ask what degree would be
the best for me to get to come to physical therapy school and really you
don't have to have any specific degree a lot of our students myself included have
a degree in exercise science, kinesiology, biology, a science intensive major it's
not required, but you will get all of your prerequisites most likely in those
majors however physical therapy has been known
as only the science but also the art of healing and so a lot of schools like to
see the diversity in their students who have different agrees there's a guy in
my class who actually has a bachelor's degree in English and he's gonna be a
fantastic physical therapist who you really want to pick your degree based on
what you are interested in because if you're not interested in the classes
you're taking in undergrad you're not going to do well in the most likely and
you do have to have pretty good grades to get into physical therapy school so
pick something that you enjoy you do have to have prerequisites you need two
classes of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology, you'll need one class in
exercise physiology, one class of anatomy and one class of physiology and one class of
statistics you'll also need reference letters and most schools want you to
have at least one reference letter from a physical therapist you need you won't
need necessarily experience in PTC because not all schools require it but
it is good for you to experience the profession that you want to be a part of
I think it's really good for you to go in and shadow Pete either workers apt
tech because you get to know what the day in day out is for physical therapist
so you really know is this the job that I would like to do for the rest of my
life
the application process is pretty long you have to your application in for each
school that you want to apply for and then some schools do you still do an
interview process and so you have to go through an interview a little bit about
the program
DPT it's a three-year program, it's pretty rigorous having gone through two
years so far, you'll be in class around five to six hours a day, but there's a
lot of time spent after class where you have to practice the skills they are
learning and of course study for exams and practicals your first year you're
learning mainly the basics of examination and treatment, they do like to integrate
some clinical time in all of your years the first year you're mainly in the
classroom, but you get a little bit of clinic time to say practice what you're
doing and really get to see how much you love what you're doing
your second year you're going to be half in the clinic, half in the classroom and
you're doing more specialty classes like pediatrics and wound care and
cardiopulmonary and then you get to go in the clinics and work and get to use
all that you learned and see all these amazing things and then in your third
year you're going to be fine tuning what you've learned with classes like
differential diagnosis where you really learn the specifics of how to tell the
difference between something that's musculoskeletal that we can deal with
and something that needs to be referred to a physician and you also learn skills
like reading xrays and your third year and admin classes in your third year but
mainly your third year you're gonna be in the clinic direct access is something
that has come about over the last several years there is a form of direct
access in every single state in the USA now and this is mainly because we are
transitioning to this doctoral level physical therapy program where we're
getting these differential diagnosis classes and we know that we know how to
look at a patient and say you need to go see another doctor or you know you were
good working with me I know how to deal with what you have
because we started out as that physicians assistant and we've been
always to this point had to have a referral from a physician and so direct
access is making us more like a primary care provider in that patients can come
to us first and don't have to see another doctor before they see us so
what does the future hold for physical therapy there is some uncertainty about
our future because of the Affordable Care Act's and the changes that are
happening in health care but luckily forbes has ranked physical therapist is
having one of the top ten happiest jobs in 2011 and 2013 and it's been listed as
one of the top 10 jobs in high demand because for a few reasons our population
is aging, the baby boomers are getting older and older over 50 and with age
comes these
disorders like arthritis and so that's something that we deal with there's also
a lifestyle diseases that are becoming more prevalent such as diabetes and
cardiovascular disease and respiratory disorders that we can deal with and we
can help with
and another thing our medical field has become so much better that people are
living through these horrible things like a massive stroke and people can
live through it now because of the advances in our medical field and so
these people that are that used to would have passed away now we get to treat and
help them get back to whatever lifestyle that they can't have so in closing
whatever you do in choosing to do whether be physical therapy or something
else I wish you luck I think physical therapy is a fantastic field and I am
blessed to be a part of it so good luck to you and your undergrad endeavors