"Physical therapy is not a subspecialty of the medical profession and physical therapists are not medical doctors; we are a separate profession that provides a unique service that physicians are unable and untrained to provide."

Letter to the AMA from the APTA, Dec 2009

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Physical Therapists and America's Disability System

Thanks to Adam Rufa, PT at ForwardThinkingPT.com for pointing our attention to the This American Life episode on March 22nd, 2013 called Trends With Benefits.  This episode is about disability in America.

Read Adam's excellent post about the 14 million Americans who don't show up for work every Monday morning but also don't show up in the official Federal unemployment numbers.

Rising disability is a 30-year American trend and 250,000 new Americans are applying for disability each month.

Perhaps the most backwards part about the disability system in America is there are only two ways off: you get so old that Social Security and Medicare take over or, you die.

Amazingly, the disability program doesn't provide physical therapy benefits to return you to your prior level of function.

Physical therapists should listen to this 57:26 minute podcast by reporter Chana Joffe-Walt for a very interesting tutorial on America's disability system.

Perhaps physical therapists  can understand our patients' perspective a little better if we understand the system we all live in.


Free Tutorial

Get free stuff at BulletproofPT.com

Tim Richardson, PT owns a private practice at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc in Palmetto, Florida. The clinic website is at MedicalArtsRehab.com.

Bulletproof Expert Systems: Clinical Decision Support for Physical Therapists in the Outpatient Setting is a manager's workbook with stories, checklists, charts, graphs, tables, and templates describing how you can use paper-based or computerized tools to improve your clinic's Medicare compliance, process adherence and patient outcomes.

Tim has implemented a computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system in his clinic since 2006 that serves as a Reminder, Alerting, Prompting and Predicting CDS using evidence-based tests and measures.

Tim can be reached at
TimRichPT@BulletproofPT.com .

"Make Decisions like Doctors"


Copyright 2007-2010 by Tim Richardson, PT.
No reproduction without authorization.

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Consistent with the American Physical Therapy Association Vision Statement for Physical Therapy 2020, the American Physical Therapy Association supports exclusive physical therapist ownership and operation of physical therapy services.