Clinic Plans for 2022!
Great Northern has lots of goals and plans for 2022. As always, we want to continue to provide our patients with high quality physical therapy with an unparalleled focus on customer service. But beyond that, we will be focusing on these new things in the upcoming year:
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Christian is finishing up his last year as the president of the Montana chapter for the APTA. He is hopeful to continue working on getting important legislation through congress.
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Jim continues expand his vestibular practice. Great Northern now has a high tech system using the Insight infrared video goggles that transmit to a computer so we can better diagnose vestibular conditions.
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Kara and Kate plan to do a few more presentations in the valley on topics in pelvic health to continue to spread the word about the benefits of pelvic floor physical therapy!
Welcome Tessa; our new Office Manager!
Great Northern is happy to announce that we have hired Tessa Dincau as our office manager. Tessa is a native of Bozeman and just graduated from MSU with her degree in Exercise Science. She has hopes to attend physical therapy school next January and in the mean time is going to keep everyone here in line and our office running smoothly!
Tessa at a glace:
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Tessa loves to be outside in any way; hiking, hunting, skiing, you name it she’s into it!
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Tessa is an avid hunter and this year got a deer and elk!
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Tessa loves to cook; chicken fried steak is her specialty.
The Latest Research
Research on attitudes of rehab patients show this to be true in recovery as well. A review of 23 articles looking at outcomes for shoulder pain found a few interesting things. First, patients who expected to recover and believed that they had some control over the outcome, ended up doing better than those who didn’t. Second, optimistic patients were found to have less pain and disability after completing rehab. Third, patients who believed they’d have pain and disability after surgery tended to have – you guessed it – pain and disability after their surgery. Research says that patients tend to get what they expect.
Patient attitudes are important, but what about the attitudes of the therapists’? There isn’t much research specific to PT, but there is a study done in elementary schools that might give us some clues. Two psychologists, Rosenthal and Jacobs, did a study that found teacher expectations had an influence on student performance. They told teachers that randomly selected students in their classes were tested and found to be “late bloomers”. These students were expected to show large improvements in academic performance during the school year. When the students were tested 8 months later, the students the teachers believed would improve the most, did.
It’s pretty easy to see how this could cross over into a PT clinic. If a PT thinks a patient can get better, they’ll probably put more effort into designing a program, spend more time with them and push them harder than someone they don’t believe has a lot of room for improvement.
When the patient and therapist both expect a good outcome, they usually get one!