Archive for the ‘Individual Change’ Category

Rehab Burnout?

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the May 2010 issue of PT in Motion magazine [See bottom of the clipping for my response to the question on how to avoid burnout].

What went on the edit floor was the resource I linked to saying:

Just completed a two year study with exciting results when people learn very basic awareness skills. http://matthewjtaylorinstitute.com/researchprojects.php#courage

We found that over a 2-yr period we created an environment that reduced with statistical significance all of burnout parameters we measure pre, post and 12 months post in a major rehab setting during the Great Recession of 2009 and the implementation of an awkward EMR system!

It was fascinating to watch as the rehab professionals returned to sensing and feeling their fatigue and burnout, they actually began to feel better and most importantly, act differently.

They changed their self-care routines, re-organized their time commitments, and approached management about changing processes they identified as contributing to their stress. Job satisfaction soared, considering leaving the organization or profession plummeted. Patients also stopped canceling afternoon BID sessions, so revenue increased.

All from a little posture, breath awareness, movement and attention to present sensations/thoughts and emotions.

So just like our patients, our way "home" to comfort is through feeling, NOT fleeing to one more job or numbing ourselves to get through to the weekend.

Go lay down with a pillow running length wise up your spine, spread your arms, palms up and legs comfortably apart. Watch the breathing take place (leave it alone) and pay attention to what you can feel for 15 minutes. You'll have more battery bars when you roll over and stand up…I promise….we have proof. 

How do you avoid burnout?

 

Neck Pain Relief with a hint of DSR Method

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

krucoff yoga neck pain cover

 

Carol Krucoff's newly released book "Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain" is now available. Carol is a colleague of mine from the International Yoga Therapy Association. In addition to being an award-winning journalist, Carol is a Yoga therapist at the Duke Integrative Medicine Center. 

She was kind enough to request my professional review as she wrote the book. Such a request demonstrates her conscientious quest for the best resources she can offer her readers…and hence her awards. Her professionalism and prior research into the topic made "lite" work for me (hence the "hint of DSR Method"…she understands and addresses the multiple systems perspective that affects neck and shoulder comfort). The clarity of her writing coupled with her gift of putting things simply was a pleasure to experience.

She was also very generous in her acknowledgement of my participation in her Acknowledgment section. Thank you Carol!

Understanding as we do that all reviews are unbiased and totally objective, you can read my review of her book at Amazon here. You can purchase the book here.

I recommend this resource to both my clients and my professional colleagues as I believe both will gain new insights and approaches for healthy upper quarter posture.

I look forward to Carol's next book as I'm sure by now she's bored and pining away in NC with nothing else to do. Thanks again Carol and good luck with the next phase of this publishing process!


 

 

 

 

 

Fancy footwear with funny “souls” a spiritual issue?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

 

I had this question posed on my FB wall from a professional colleague.

Thought I would use it as an interesting insight into how we might change our reference point with clients….

What do you think?


Matt, what do you think about the roller soled shoes? They work the foot in a triplanar fashion and the ground reaction force moves up the kinetic chain improving posture and circulation. A therapist recommended I get them. I waited and just go a mimic from sketcher's called shape ups. They currently appear to be worthy of recommending them to some of my patients. I need to study them a little more. The only down fall I can foresee is that they disconnect the body from true gravitational forces. It is important that we experience the bones in our feet touch true ground without interference of a rubber shoe. I suspect that is one reason you have all patients take off their shoes and ambulate.

 

about an hour ago ·  ·  · See Wall-to-Wall

 
Matthew Taylor

Matthew Taylor 

The DSR Method always asks about 10 more layers of why vs stopping at symptomatic Rx such as these shoes.

Why isn't the person dealing well with ground reaction forces?
Why is the foot collapsed w/ subsequent postural imbalances?
Why is the pelvis tight, asymmetrical and the person not breathing well?
Why isn't the person aware of all this?
Why can't they breathe if even they are made aware?
Why can't they breathe even if much of the musculoskeletal restriction is addressed?
Why is it important psychologically and spiritually how our base of support interfaces with the earth beyond mere, simple mechanics?
Why do we treat ourselves and others like separated, cut-out paper dolls not directly and intimately intertwined with the rest of creation as reflected in modern physics and biology?

Those kind of why's….answer that and the need for the shoes drops to a very small number of people.

 
 
 

Physical Therapy’s role in Genetics

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

 

The December 2009 PT in Motion magazine has the cover story: "Rooting Out Genetic Links" by Eric Ries. A beautiful cover, but once again a reactionary perspective with little vision of our role in rehab affecting genetics…why are we always so passive?

 

The article concludes quoting Steve Wolf, PT, PhD, FAPTA: 
 
For Wolf, heightened awareness cannot come fast enough, given the frantic pace of scientific discovery.
"It's only a matter of time—some people say less than 5 years—before human stem cells and other progenitor cells start being produced that can change the way in which a pathological gene is expressed," he says. "These things are happening. We must be prepared to deal with them."
 
Too late! It has already happened and we're standing on the sidelines waiting for the genome to act rather than stepping up to work with the genome!
 
UPDATE: May 2010 U of Michigan reports PTSD and its role in gene expression
 
What if PT's had clinical skills within their scope of practice that had been shown to "manipulate"…(I guess technically mobilize as manipulate is now to mean high speed, low amplitude thrust) gene expression?
 
Well, I had the honor of introducing Dean Ornish, MD as our keynote speaker at our 2009 Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research. In the TED talk below Dean describes how using education, movement with awareness, breathing exercises, group social connection and interaction and nutritional changes in a positive social setting it has been demonstrated you can modulate genetic expression in men with prostate cancer. Here's the research article

Hmmmm…does that sound like the scope of practice of any profession we know and care about?

 

Don't just imagine rehab altering genetic expression….empower your clients today!  …and we got excited when we started moving facet joints!!! 

Isn't this amazing???!!

Now…do we "flex" or "extend" the genes?…the next great debate!

Mirror, Mirror…Who is the most creative of all?

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Re-Habilitation: "To make fit to live in (again or for the first time)"

Each person or organization brings unique circumstances to rehabilitation. Cookie-cutter approaches and statistically average group responses to clinical trials may suggest a general direction, but are void of any creativity in a complex situation. 

So what is a creative response?

And who is the most creative of all?

These, like the Queen's own inquiry re: fairest, are actually deeply spiritual questions. They ask, Who am I? What am I? and their answers then generate drive and motivation to act/move in response.

These are questions that I as a professional must ask as part of my development of clinical mastery (pillar of EBM), as well as How creative do I think my client's are?… and therefore, What is their role?(second pillar of EBM:  Patient Values), and then finally, what's been done, accepted AND published in the literature? (3rd pillar, Levels of research)

We've got it all backwards right now in PT for sure, and in organizational management as well. Our constrained perspectives limit us to only what has been done, shutting out "What could be?" Those of us in creativity work can tell you that's a big dead end to creating a future that is "fit to live in." Whether one is living with an ACL deficient knee, an aggressive carcinoma or a dysfunctional job in a dysfunctional company in a dysfunctional economy.

So who is the most creative of all?

Here are a couple thoughts that when I came upon them resulted in the comfort box being not only stepped out of, but broken down, recycled and dispersed back into a whole new raft of perspectival (dictionary says that's a new word) containers that I use today:

  1. Creativity is the ability for an organization, system or individual to adapt to the environment…easy enough.
  2. The individual human is now sub-ordinate in evolutionary chain to the more influential and dominant top of the life chain: Multi-national corporations (See Senge et al, Presence, 2004).
  3. Single cell organisms while less complex, are faster at evolution/adaptation and have a broad and robust communication organizational net: see Swine flu etc.

So where does that leave us? 

The good news is we're right in the middle as a holon…composed of trillions of single cell organisms (both "us" and our "flora") AND we together compose the multi-nationals. 

So be sure you do your personal mindbody practice, because as Peter Senge (2004, p. 234) says,

 

"We may not be able to change the larger systems overnight, but we can commit to the continual development of awareness and the capacity to choose. That’s why personal cultivation is so important. It keeps you sensitive and in the matrix."

 

Now, go get your mirror, ask the questions, and let me know what you hear!

 

What is “altered” sensation? Can it be “trusted”?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Here is a fascinating piece on sensory experience, learning and function.

18 min TED talk but has the potential to shift how you think about working with client's, their sensations and the utility of those "abhorrent" perceptions.

 

It is only when we "know" for sure that we become dangerous to ourselves and others. What if we celebrate and share the experience of our clients and investigate together what is "real" vs what is wrong?

Amazing things happen "right before our eyes"!

 

What have you seen?

Do We Really Motivate and Inspire Others?

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Attending the Private Practice Section's Annual Meeting last week raised some interesting questions I hadn't considered since my doctoral studies. Important questions that upon reflection it seems I too often glaze over:


  1. Can we really ever get/make/inspire someone or some organization to change?
  2. Or do we merely create environments of safety, challenge and opportunity to allow change/creativity to emerge rather than be held back?

To my way of thinking right now it seems all too easy to make objects out of people and have them be objects to which we do things to in order to generate preplanned outcomes…much as we do with a widget coming down the assembly line. While you can coerce certain individuals to behave in some manner, the motivational literature suggests that isn't a sustainable model.

These questions reminded me of the difference between education (educare: to draw out) vs instruction/teaching (to put in) … One has a collaborative sense to it, the other a dominating or "over thou" mentality. Instructing information and skills is fairly easy, being and educator that can provide a learning environment that permits the student to examine their assumptions and test new ones requires a whole other skill set, and I believe a deep personal practice of awareness of the educator's agenda first. If it includes being the doer/the fixer/ or the healer….ohhhhh, I don't know.

What set off this line of  thinking was when my son Adam commented on FB that he was sure "You really got them thinking." …which is true I suspect many had something to consider and contemplate. But not so much by what I said as the environment I created.  My response to my very wise son, an educator himself, was, "What I learned Adam was that it's most important that people have the chance to "feel/sense" again…once you create that space, then their thinking shifts and they access the wisdom they were looking for outside themselves….very important lesson for me."
 
So what do you think…where does the inspiration or motivation come from? 
 
Can you make someone inspired? ….I don't think so, but wonder what you think?  And if you think you can, I want to hear how you think that might occur? ….great stuff…I've been studying it since 1978….still don't have the answers but lots of good questions.