A ode to my teacher

A ode to my teacher

I used to think a teacher was a person who taught you stuff like stroke rehabilitation, Math, etc. Then i went to college and met Mr. Siva Chidambaram. He was my lecturer and the junior most of all my teachers. He was sort of a poor teacher when he went and taught in the class room. He would not write in the board, could not effectively hold the classrooms attention. However, when he taught bedside clinical issues he just transformed into Stephen Hawking explaining black holes to novice in theoretical physics. He was clear in his views made you want to do it then and there what he was asking to do.

His greatness was that he could teach me stroke or SCI, but the way he would make you “want” to learn more. He was telling us to always look forward with theories and techniques.  He was teaching us MRP in 92 when most of the world taught it meant a tyre company.  He would tell me to try mobilisation of the knee joint using techniques he and i saw in a book.

The best anecdote about my beloved teacher is when i started to do my ortho project in 5 semester for my under graduation.  Unlike know, those days the topics were selected by the teachers and we have to select one through lot system. Presto i pick Potts fracture. My teacher who was man bent on teaching me told me to go and refer “Watson and Jones – fractures and injuries. He added that it is the bible of traumatology and I should read this book for the project.

I go and open this book on Ankle injuries and in the first few pages it says- Potts might have made a mistake and blah, blah and they concluded the better terminology could be “Ankle injuries”. I go and show it to my teacher and he says well we have to change our title for your project. We go and show it to my professor after protesting for some time she also agrees. The lesson is they were able to change their views even when a lowly 5 th semester student showed some literature.

Sadly nowadays the teachers will not change their views even it came and hit them on their face. Some clinical are beyond repair they just won’t look for evidence. The standard answer they have is well it works for me and my patients. It is like saying to Newton huh! My apple went up so i am not sure your theory and proof is good enough for me.

Love

K Hariohm

Today’s homers quote

BARNEY: Hey, Homer; you're late for English!

HOMER: Pffft, English. Who needs that? I'm never going to England.

Film songs theory part II

In continuing with my “film song theory”, the other off shoot of it is the so called ecclective approach. Some therapist can’t leave their song and dance routine they have come up with this idea called as ecclective approach.
What pray you may ask is ecclective approach? Well you take a bunch of treatment written before man went to moon and mash it all together and think well i am a genius.  The treatment commonly mashed together are PNF, NDT, SI, Brunstromm and other initials i have missed.

What is wrong with that you ask, adding you take the good from all the treatment? For example i will use NDT when the patient cannot move, use stimulus ideas from PNF and use what the heck cranio-sacral therapy to well make a fool out of me. The problem is these techniques were once the cutting edge in science- well in the 70s and 80s (of course cranio-sacral therapy was nonsense even then) but like everything else time and science changes.

These treatments physiological validity and clinical effectiveness has been over time been proved to be very limited. Hence putting two or more treatment with iffy evidence is not new improved treatment. The garbage ladies of our street collect the garbage from each of our house and put it in a large bin at the end of the street. Putting it all together in the end of the street does not make all the garbage into gold it just makes it into bigger garbage.

So we need to move on make movies without songs like the one Adoor Gopalakrishnan makes. We need to come up with new ideas, use ideas which have clinical evidence- proven and use it with our experience and the most important organ of the therapist - well not the hands, the brain.

Every blog i am going to close with a quote from hero- Homer Simpson

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! --Homer Simpson

 love 

Hariohm

hi

Hi
 
   After countless push from Prakash V I am starting my blog today. As this is going to be my first I am going to make it simple and non-controversial as possible.

I was having my usual weekly conversation with my friend on –well what else physiotherapy and overall lack of scientific backing for some of our physiotherapeutic techniques.
The question in our mind was why we are unable to move on. You learn something in a particular point of time say manual therapy or NDT and when you see the idea is outdated or the treatment is plain useless we still can’t get over it. Even intelligent therapists seem to be stuck in the time warp. I have seen experts in neurology unable to come to terms with moving of science and time. The common example I use to stress this is the prevalence of normalization, thinking purely mechanical and searching for that one treatment which will bring about the magic touch and heal. (Will write about “hands on” some other time.)

One of the theories we came to is “film music theory” of why we wont move on. The theory is fairly simple in Tamil film industry we have serious film makers who want to make neo-realism movies, but can’t get out of the idea of not having music. Even though it not in the “proper” to have songs in neo-realism they can’t seem to do it because of the 100 years of tradition have making crappy movies with songs.

Likewise in this age of evidence informed practice (EIP) we still can’t come out of NDT if you treat children with cerebral palsy.  This is exploited by the companies which sell these course- and they have “certified tutors”- whatever that means (still can’t understand to teach some techniques why you need to certified- that to a treatment which can be taught in 15 minutes). They charge up to  2 lakhs if they come in a plane from North America- they still teach you the same crap they taught you in your UG- well no one learns anything in PG.

Why this fascination with un-scientific courses, is it because we have to have songs in our movies come what may.