Posts Tagged ‘rehabilitation’

Rehab Professionals and the Wellness Industry: Where Do We Belong?

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

When it comes to fitness and wellness, I'm afraid most rehab professionals too easily step into the ruts of the industry rather than consider "What might be?".

I was fortunate enough to be thrust into the wellness arena the first year of my professional rehab career. The US Army was big into the new buzz word of 1982: Corporate Fitness.   OUCH…some one is getting old and hopefully for those of you new to wellness you get some perspective on how "Un-new" wellness in the workplace really is!

What disappoints me is that almost every article on rehab and wellness gravitates to the same old models of flexibility assessment, posture screens, standard ergonomic assessment….YAWN! Is that the best we can do?

So what should we be doing? CREATING SOMETHING NEW & BETTER!

At the AZAPTA Fall Conference in 2009 the theme was wellness and fitness. Here is the short one page position paper I distributed articulating a call for us to step forward to LEAD a true biopsychosocial revolution in fitness. Click here to read. 

Here a couple of things I am creating:

 

 

 

What are you doing to bring forward new programming in fitness and wellness that we weren't doing 10, 15 or 20 years ago? 

Let me know…we can and MUST do better than what is out there now!

What does Love have to do with it?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

When is the last time you read about love and treating clients that wasn't about boundaries and ethics?

Have you ever read about love and how to utilize love in clinical relationships?

I haven't.

Yet the majority of people claim some belief in a higher power and over 50% a belief in a god. Most of those beliefs coalesce around values to include compassion, love and caring. So why aren't we as professionals talking about how those core personal beliefs concretely and directly impact our work moment to moment with the client? How can PT's talk about the "The Art of Caring" and then only exhort p-values?

I am asserting you don't have to like all of your clients….but you do have to love everyone of them.

Same goes for your co-workers and 3rd party intermediaries.

Anything less and you are practicing with a serious break in your personal integrity….unless of course you are one of those who don't think love has anything to do with it. 

To practice from that perspective is very difficult. The principle is simple. I work at every day and fail at it multiple times a day. So I get up and try it again the next day. 

And I laugh at me…because after all, if I can't love my human imperfections, no one else has a chance.

Love matters. Period.