RESOURCES
Plantiga from a Practitioner’s Perspective
As a physiotherapist working out of the Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic in Edmonton, AB I work with a large population of people (we’ll call them athletes here as most play sports anywhere from a national to recreational level) with knee injuries and have been lucky enough to spend a majority of my time on knee assessments and knee rehab.
The Value of Quantitative Data: A Chiropractor's Perspective
This is the final blog post in a four-part series on the Plantiga system and how it can help the individual patient, the athlete, the weekend warrior, the clinician, and the performance practitioner generate their own objective measures to optimize their health and manage recovery after injury.
Data-Driven Return to Activity
Earlier this year Sean Ross-Ross, Plantiga’s CTO, posted about his recovery from a right ankle fracture and syndesmotic injury he suffered in November 2019 after slipping on a wet dock. In this post, I review Sean’s Plantiga data and discuss his rehabilitation progress, 7 months later.
Using Data To Fill In The Gaps
At the end of the day, a practitioner is trying to figure out how a person is doing (progressing, regressing or sometimes just maintaining) and if there are trainable deficits that can be addressed with exercise and treatment.
Musculoskeletal Telehealth
For the last few weeks I’ve been assessing individuals exclusively via telephone or video due to COVID-19 precautions. There are some clear benefits to a Telehealth practice: patients don’t need to travel or pay for parking and I can easily show web-based resources with a screen share. Studies have shown that for chronic musculoskeletal complaints and concussion there is a high level of agreement between in-person and Telehealth assessments and patient satisfaction is high (1–3).
Data-Driven Recovery
Hello all! The photo above was taken November 9, 2019 by my wife on the way to Victoria General Hospital after I suffered a syndesmotic ankle fracture (not only did I break my ankle, I also tore a ligament). I slipped on a wet dock while taking a walk.
Assessing Asymmetries with Movement Maps
Have you ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect? You should Google this term. It refers to the effects of taking a measurement on what we actually want to measure. Imagine you are a sociologist interested in the sexual behaviours of middle-aged men. How effective would it be to park your lab equipment in the bedroom of your study participants to understand what really happens? That’s the Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect also impacts neuromuscular testing.
Assessing Functional Asymmetries After Injury
I struggled early in my career to marry science with coaching. I lived in a dichotomy. I was a graduate student completing a Master of Science in muscle physiology, doing all kinds of neuromuscular testing. I would then leave the lab, head down to the weight room to coach athletes. I found it hard to bring science into the weight room in a meaningful way. The testing methods I was using were either (a) noisy (b) impractical or (c) not sensitive to performance or reducing the impact of injuries.