Can Yoga Teachers provide Physical Therapy?

Transcript

hey guys Arielle here I got an email last night and I wanted to share this with you so the email was from a stranger writing that he's looking into becoming a physical therapist but the only problem is quote I'm not finding much more value in physical therapy than I do in yoga he's saying that the distinctions between physical therapy and yoga are that physical therapists also do ultrasound braces and cortisone cream I have uh not used ultrasound in over a year in my practice I don't give people braces or Orthotics necessarily every now and then and I definitely do not use cortisone cream um and then this this person emailed me and wrote quote I'm finding that I already do the job of a physical therapist in yoga he's a current yoga teacher quote down to its core I can't see how physical therapy is much different than yoga the basis of both is to restore functional movement I feel like the exercises we perform in yoga include and exceed those performed in physical therapy so I wrote him back and I am also going to share part of my response uh in this video so there are two things that distinguish yoga teachers and physical therapists and the first thing I have to say is that if you think that this point of view that there's not a big difference between physical therapists and yoga teachers uh is uh rare I I would actually have to step up and say that it's not that rare there's quite a few of the teachers who believe that they offer the same value and I think that that is a genuine Folly of Youth and there's a few reasons for that one of which is both the experience and the expertise that physical therapists bring to the table and I'll get to that in a minute but the other is really just the education so probably most practicing yoga teachers don't even have the Baseline prerequisites to apply to not to mention get into physical therapy school it's really challenging program the year that I got accepted into physical therapy school they accepted 54 slots for about 300 applicants and the following year they had almost 600 applicants for those same 54 slots it is a clinical doctorate is a three-year program and I had about a year and a half of pure prerequisites to do Beyond above and beyond my undergraduate it takes place in an accredited University and the programs themselves are further overseen by an accrediting agency and uh there is a national licensing exam that you must pass after receiving your diploma by the way within the crediting agency of these DPT programs the doctorate in physical therapy programs in the U.S is a mandate that you can't have a GPA average below 3.0 so you have to keep your three 3.0 or higher or 3.2 or higher whatever it is or else you're on academic probation and ineligible to graduate so then once you graduate you study study study pass a national licensing exam and then you pass a state licensing exam very often I suppose there's probably some states that may not have that but most of them do and then you are subject once you are a licensed Healthcare professional and paying your fees every year or two years um you're subject to random audits audits that show that you have done your continuing education requirements you're subject to Legal oversight and Regulation and the loss or being sued being fined and maybe losing some of your privileges as a physical therapist or losing your license or temporary suspension if you don't follow the law and the regulations embedded within the programs there's also clinical experiences so you have full-time uh experience working with patients before you even graduate and that in my program added up to full-time six months when I did the math and I added it all up and those experiences were in a sub in an ICU I was in ICU for four weeks I was in a setting where I worked predominantly full-time with workers compensation I was in a setting where I worked full time with people who have spinal cord injuries and neurologic injuries I was an outpatient General Orthopedic setting where we saw everything under the Sun from surgery to ankle sprains to elderly to almost Pediatrics we we truly saw everything and there was there's one more that I'm missing but it was it was very similar Orthopedic one I believe um and then finally there are physical therapists who to complete residencies and specialize and become certified in pelvic floor or neuro or spinal cord injury and you can get really you can go very very deep in a number of different directions once you have a physical therapy degree including wound care so these are all subjects that we have to study extensively within our educational programs so there's a huge huge difference between a physical therapist and a yoga teacher based on just the education and just the licensing and the legalities of it and just the actual how to get from point A to point B what it takes to become a physical therapist not to mention that all of that education is very very evidence-based so we're studying um we're studying treatment and tests and measures from the point of view of of actual research that has gone into these programs and then finally there is this separate column so even if you don't necessarily value all of that education which is a huge time commitment a huge resource commitment Financial commitment for people who become physical therapists maybe you'll value the expertise and the actual experience that a physical therapist has as compared to a yoga teacher so people who come to physical therapists are almost always in pain and are experiencing debilitating illness right and that could be um you know anything from an ankle sprain to what's known as Lou Gehrig's disease ALS you could have folks with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease or you could be working on a traumatic brain injury unit dealing with anyone from the first week or first day or first six months of a traumatic brain injury and of course you can also be working with high-level athletes and returning people like Kobe Bryant or something like that some uh you know Stellar athlete to the field and that requires a lot more specific information than just do 10 sun salutations if you come out of physical therapy school if you make it through that whole process which for me took me more than four and a half years and you start in a full-time job very very likely you're going to have patient every half hour and that's most likely to be set up in a way that you have patients for about seven hours out of your eight hour day so you have quote unquote one hour to document when reality it usually takes a bit longer than that but seven hours of half hour patient appointments comes out to 70 appointments in a five day week and you that means you're sitting down 70 times was one-on-one with some individual who's in pain some individual who is experiencing who has experienced a huge physical trauma or sometimes mental emotional trauma and patients are skeptical and they ask questions and they have high demands and um we work within the context of organizations hospitals and outpatient facilities that are also regulated that are also seeking feedback in a very systematic way where patients can rate you as a healthcare practitioner with things that yoga teachers don't necessarily face right that kind of constant feedback other than class was great right and we sit through really meaningful continuing education classes that education workshops continuing ed workshops that I tend to sign up for are usually two full days that start at 8 A.M on a Saturday and go to 6 p.m and then they'll start up again at 8 A.M on a Sunday and they'll go to 4 30 p.m that's the two-day version so then there's the three day that also include a Friday night and then there's also four day versions in the school that I most uh frequently study with and then there's ongoing education around billing and ongoing education around evidence-based for red flags like deep veins thromboses that can kill people if you don't catch them or heart attacks or things like this um and then just to go to this point of yoga as functional movement in a nutshell it's not in a nutshell it's not functional movement it might be a great exercise a great cross training for exercise but functional movement means climbing up and down stairs without pain um easily functional movement means getting onto an off the floor functional movement is not Warrior one it is not Eagle pose it is not uh it it is not these specific things that we do within the context of yoga it is um maybe climbing a wall or running is actually a functional movement or just walking and I cannot tell you how many times I've seen people who've been diligent yoga practitioners who still have really essential challenges with basic functional movement physical therapy and yoga teaching are two completely different animals and if you really want to know I recommend that you go Shadow a physical therapist for at least a day and maybe consider shadowing a physical therapist in a few different settings a hospital setting an inpatient setting an outpatient setting a setting that sees Pediatrics a setting that sees maybe wound care a setting that come that allows for you know a huge variety of people coming in off the street with and without insurance for example or good insurance so to speak and these are the things that physical therapists do they're very very different than a yoga teacher we have a lot of responsibilities as physical therapists and it's um it's so vastly different than teaching a group yoga class I can't even explain it fully in less than 10 minutes as you can see but uh I do not like that this meme is out there that this idea that diminishes what is physical therapy is out there and I truly think that once you're in your 30s once you're in your 40s almost everybody starts to experience some level of injury or some level of breakdown of joints where you will be humbled enough to have to go seek help and you will be humbled enough to have to go see a physical therapist and that's when I ask you and encourage you to go out and seek a really Stellar really um engaged physical therapist and discover for yourselves the difference between uh someone who has this type of education this type of responsibility this type of licensure versus a yoga teacher who maybe has 200 hours of yoga teacher training thank you so much for watching and understanding