CITIZEN COLUMNIST: Get physical | Citizen Columnists - SCNow

CITIZEN COLUMNIST: Get physical | Citizen Columnists - SCNow

CITIZEN COLUMNIST: Get physical | Citizen Columnists - SCNow

Posted: 30 Jul 2019 11:03 PM PDT

We all need physical therapy (PT), or soon will.

Basically, physical therapy improves our ability to move by treating bones, nerves, joints, cartilage, ligaments and muscles, not with surgery or medicines but with targeted exercise, including joint mobilization, massage, heat, cold, electromagnetic waves, water, vibration and other physical forms.

From Wikipedia: "The physical therapist professional curriculum includes content in the clinical sciences (e.g., content about the cardiovascular, pulmonary, endocrine, metabolic, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, integumentary, musculoskeletal, and neuromuscular systems and the medical and surgical conditions frequently seen by physical therapists). Current training is specifically aimed to enable physical therapists to appropriately recognize and refer non-musculoskeletal diagnoses that may present similarly to those caused by systems not appropriate for physical therapy intervention, which has resulted in direct access to physical therapists in many states."

The Greeks were probably the first physical therapists back in about 500 BC, with some famous practitioners including Hippocrates and Galen.

The first physical therapy textbook was for the Swedish gymnastics' programs published in 1813. The Swedes certified physical therapists from about 1887. Soon the English followed the Swedes, with the Americans joining in at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1914.

The polio epidemic of 1916 lead to orthopedic surgery on children with the subsequent obvious demand for physical therapy.

World War I accelerated the movement toward mainstream recognition for physical therapy as an important part of overall medical care. Obvious advancement came with the establishment of a full-fledged physical therapy training program at Walter Reed Army Hospital at the start of the war.

Academic journals began in 1921, and by 1924 the American Physical Therapy Association was founded. President Roosevelt's mostly successful recovery from adult onset polio, popularized the discipline, with Warm Springs, Georgia, becoming a major physical therapy center.

Once the polio epidemic was conquered and polio vaccines became widely available, physical therapy moved out of hospitals and into the outpatient clinic by the 1960s.

An international federation was formed in 1974. The American states have their own training, testing, certification and licensing procedures, but most are very similar.

There are approximately 230,000 physical therapists in the United States with a median yearly income of $90,000. South Carolina has approximately 3,100 therapists with a median income of $85,000 per year.

Nationally, physical therapists are concentrated in New England, California, Colorado, Illinois and Michigan. State licensure began in the 1960s and 1970s. Current South Carolina regulations were amended in 1998. Our state is also served by the S.C. Physical Therapy Association. An important PT training program at Francis Marion University is on the doorstep.

Lowes Physical Therapy is the oldest private PT practice in Florence, continuing since 1982 by the Lowe brothers, David and Phillip, and expanded over the years to several regional locations. Phillip was elected to the S.C. House in 2007 and is now on the prestigious Ways and Means Committee and other important House committees. The Lowe brothers are also successful real estate developers.

Before I forget, let me introduce you to the Bonny Lass, Nancy. Her adoring and eagle- eyed business manager husband claims we are related. Bonny Lass was well educated at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she was the head of her class.

Subsequent work experience and graduate training in New Zealand, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and Charlotte has taken her to the top of her field as a licensed practitioner and doctor of physical therapy. Fearless Bonny Lass took a chance about four years ago on a small, struggling physical therapy shop in Lake City and grew it into a success story with an active gym attached.

Now she is doing the same right here in Florence, albeit no gym. She has attracted the greatest number of non-hospital licensed physical therapists in our region with a well-trained support staff, all with friendly, personal and expert treatment plans and programs.

She has developed dance support programs and worked on school injury prevention and screening. And now she stands on the verge of a new, third shop.

We all respond well to her personally, her quality staff and their personal friendliness, attention and success; and, oh, that adoring business manager fellow, too.

Get healthy. Get in motion. Go pro.

Johns Hopkins to study polio-like condition causing paralysis in US children - Billings Gazette

Posted: 28 Jul 2019 09:52 PM PDT

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of Alabama at Birmingham will study a condition that mysteriously began ramping up in 2014 and has caused paralysis in hundreds of children around the world.

Acute flaccid myelitis has been called polio-like, but doctors don't know what causes it, though they suspect it's a rare response to common enteroviruses that normally lead to far more mild infections.

"AFM produces devastating and long-standing neurological problems for children affected," said Dr. Carlos Pardo-Villamizar, director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Transverse Myelitis Center and co-principal investigator of the study. "Thus, there is an urgent need for a concerted collaborative effort around the country to tackle the problem with our best research tools and come up with better options for diagnosis and treatment."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier this month that there were a record number of cases confirmed last year, 233. Since 2014, when the CDC began tracking the condition, there have been 570 confirmed cases, with more reports in late summer and early fall.

So far in 2019, there have been 11 confirmed cases.

There is no specific cure or prevention, though physical therapy is used as early as possible to improve muscle strength. Many children fully recover, though it can take months. The condition causes inflammation and damage to the spinal cord, resulting in paralysis of arms and legs. It also can cause facial drooping, difficultly swallowing, slurred speech and trouble breathing.

The researchers were awarded a $10 million federal grant by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the course of the condition at 38 sites in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Peru over five years. They also will document the symptoms and severity, assess outcomes and identify related viruses. The data will help scientists determine who is most at risk and serve as a basis for treatments.

"Knowledge gained from this study hopefully will provide the foundation for future treatment studies of antiviral drugs," said Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's division of pediatric infectious diseases and the study's other co-principal investigator.

The study is expected to begin enrolling patients in August.

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