According to the Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Toby Cosgrove[1], “American healthcare is in danger of being overwhelmed by data. Medical knowledge will soon double every 73 days. An estimated 800,000 papers are published yearly in 5,600 medical journals…”. To cope with the vast amount of information, health education tends to build specialties or “silos” which allow healthcare providers to concentrate on learning a smaller subset of systems and their interactions. While this specialization is a reasonable approach, it means that no practitioner is likely to have all the answers for every patient. The information explosion also means that expertise is now more distributed than ever.
Although Physical Therapy began as an adjunct to physician care, researchers in the Physical Therapy profession have worked tirelessly for decades, to generate an independent body of evidence supporting specific physical therapy evaluation and treatment options for a range of patient problems. This evidence is incorporated into educational programs leading to the Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) degree.
Specialization has also come to Physical Therapy. There are currently at least ten recognized specialty areas, each requiring additional training beyond the basic DPT degree.
The Physical Therapy profession has come so far that, in many cases, the evidence shows that replacing physicians with physical therapists as the entry point to the healthcare system for musculoskeletal disorders, is not only safe, but also cost-effective. (Pendergast,J et al., 2011; McGill,T, 2013, Bornhöft, et al., 2019)
- https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/dealing-healthcares-data-explosion/