E778 | What The New York Times Thinks About Physical Therapy
Jan 07, 2025
Physical therapy has long been associated with post-injury and post-surgery recovery. But a recent New York Times article, "You Don’t Have to Be Injured to Benefit from Physical Therapy," is challenging that narrative—and for good reason. The piece highlights the broader value of physical therapy, from proactive injury prevention to ongoing health and wellness support. Here’s a breakdown of the article and why it matters for both patients and PT clinics.
Shifting Perspectives on Physical Therapy
For years, physical therapy has been synonymous with rehabilitation, particularly following surgeries or significant injuries. While PTs have done an excellent job of positioning themselves as post-op specialists, this limited view doesn’t capture the full potential of the profession.
The article points out that physical therapy can benefit everyone—not just those recovering from an injury. This shift toward proactive, rather than reactive, care opens up a world of possibilities for physical therapists and their patients.
The Swiss Army Knife of Healthcare
The article describes physical therapists as the “Swiss Army knife of orthopedic health.” This analogy resonates because PTs combine expertise in movement, manual therapy, and exercise prescription. They can address:
- Preventative care (prehab): Preparing the body for physical demands to prevent injuries.
- Chronic injuries: Managing persistent pain or mobility issues.
- Acute injuries: Treating issues like sprains and strains as they occur.
- Post-surgical rehab: Guiding recovery and return to activity.
This versatility positions PTs as primary musculoskeletal care providers—more than just a stopgap after injury. It’s a shift that aligns physical therapy with holistic health and wellness.
The Value of One-on-One Care
A standout point in the article is the emphasis on one-on-one care. Many traditional in-network clinics prioritize volume, often relying on aides or assistants to manage patient load. However, the growing popularity of cash-based and hybrid models offers patients a higher level of individualized attention.
For example, consider this: a patient may pay $250 for a dermatologist’s five-minute consultation, often without clear answers or follow-up. In contrast, a physical therapist providing a one-hour session at $200 delivers immense value through hands-on care, tailored exercises, and patient education. This personalized approach not only addresses immediate issues but fosters long-term trust and better outcomes.
Proactive Healthcare in Action
In countries like Australia, proactive physical therapy is already the norm. The article shares the story of a recreational runner who regularly consults her physiotherapist at the start of each training cycle. Together, they optimize her movement and address potential problem areas before they lead to injury.
This proactive mindset mirrors the growing trend in the U.S. toward holistic care. Patients are seeking providers who can help them maintain health, prevent injuries, and support long-term goals. As a PT, positioning yourself as a “quarterback” for health and wellness creates opportunities to build lasting relationships with patients.
The Business Opportunity
For clinic owners, this shift represents a significant opportunity. By providing high-quality, personalized care, you can:
- Develop lifelong relationships with patients. Helping patients achieve physical goals builds trust and loyalty.
- Tap into recurring revenue streams. Proactive care creates opportunities for ongoing services.
- Differentiate your clinic. Offering holistic care beyond injury rehab sets you apart from high-volume practices.
Becoming a Health and Wellness Leader
To succeed in this evolving landscape, PTs must expand their skill sets. While manual therapy and corrective exercise remain core, understanding areas like sleep, nutrition, and stress management can elevate your practice. Patients value providers who listen, educate, and guide them toward their goals—not just those who treat symptoms.
As the New York Times article demonstrates, the future of physical therapy is bright. Patients are actively seeking professionals who can be their go-to resource for health and wellness. By positioning yourself as that trusted expert, you’ll not only grow your practice but make a meaningful impact on your community.
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Podcast Transcript
Danny: Hey, real quick, if you're serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.
Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.
I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you What's going on doc danny here with the pt entrepreneur podcast and today We are going to be breaking down a new york times article on physical therapy This is something that I saw in a newsletter is actually Jeremy DuPont's newsletter his company patch.
He's got a great newsletter with mainly, business content, marketing content for physical therapists. You can check that out if you're interested. He's got a really a really good newsletter and he share relevant. Information. And this was actually a week ago or so in his newsletter.
He mentioned this. So I read the article and I thought it was pretty interesting. And I want to give my thoughts on the article as well as my views on PT and where it fits going forward. So real quick, the the title of this article, if you want to read it yourself is you don't have to be injured to benefit from physical therapy, which is Man, what a great what a great title for what we honestly believe.
But maybe not everybody does. So it's interesting that the average person probably does think, oh, I need to be hurt or I need to have surgery. Then I go see physical therapy. And we've done a really good job of positioning ourselves as the post operative specialists in particular.
And for the type of folks that. The type of clinical practice that I had and that I, that I practiced for the duration of time that I was in, in clinical work it was more of what we'd consider sports medicine and performance based work. And in particular in the military, I get into where they fit and why this art, I found this article pretty interesting in a second, but great title brings, a good bit of visibility to, to the profession, but essentially the person that wrote this Tayla Minsberg, it sounds like she was a athlete in college and she says I cried when I graduated college because I had to say goodbye to my physical therapist, which is interesting, right?
And I can tell you whenever I stopped seeing patients, I had a number of patients cry whenever I Stop working with patients clinically and even move them over to other providers. But you develop a really strong relationship with people that you work with for a, for an extended period of time.
So she goes on to talk about finding a good PT, what that looks like. And one of the things that a PT that's referenced in here says is we're the Swiss army knife of orthopedic health. And I do like that. I used to always can like quarterback somebody's health and wellness, right?
So I said we can push on bones like chiropractor. We can massage tissue like a massage therapist and we can exercise like a personal trainer. So you have this sort of combination in some ways. I think this is where it's challenging for us is, the non injured side of things. It's hard for us to I find the right messaging sometimes because we can do so many different things.
So oftentimes like you, you get lost in the white noise of everything, but the ability to do so much is also very beneficial. Once you get somebody in the door, like that's the thing, like once they realize, Oh shit, I can, this person can do so much more than just help with a post surgical injury, right?
So they talk about different areas where PT can help, right? So preventative physical therapy or prehab, right? Chronic injuries, things that are not maybe acute, working on improving strength or mobility for nagging injuries, acute injuries. An ankle sprain or something more significant, maybe you tear your Achilles and you have rehab and then major surgeries.
And this is probably where I think. Most if you ask most people, what do physical therapists do? Oh, they help people after surgeries. That, that is a big place that we have positioned ourself as subject matter experts and it's like rehab specialists. And that's a big market, right? In the performance based world, in the cash based world, this is actually one of the smaller markets, mainly because for most people that have a surgery.
They've met their deductible, their, their insurance has kicked in and they have quite a bit of expense from that. So then they don't have as much cost to go through rehab, right? So in the performance based or cash based world that we work with a lot of people, this is an area that we do definitely see people that function in this area as a niche in particular things like, A ACL specialist would see a lot of that.
And oftentimes though, for them, it's not full case. It might be a few months in return to sport, more specific things. A lot of times this is when insurance is not reimbursing anymore. So this sort of large percentage of the profession we don't see as much, but but we are starting to see more in particular, especially full surgical recoveries and especially a lot of Later stage return to sport.
That's actually a fantastic niche. We see a lot of success with they talk about finding the right physical therapist, which is interesting. And they talk about paying out of pocket. Some appointments can cost hundreds of dollars, depends on your insurance or whether you go to somebody that takes insurance, right?
So that's obviously something that they're they're addressing where to find them. They talk about, places where you go, if you want to find a good physical therapist and you're part of a running club, you should ask them what, who you should see, which go figure. When we talk about local marketing, we talk about being a part of a community for a number of reasons.
Like obviously you're a part of that community. You find it interesting. But also it's like the people that are are going to be your avatar, your target audience, they're there as well. Or being at a gym and ask people there, where can you find a good PT or who's a good recommendation, right?
These are congregation points for local marketing. And that's exactly where you want to be and spend time and be a part of a community in order to get these word of mouth referrals that are honestly just your best potential clients. And then the other thing they talk about that I thought was interesting was this.
One person or one PT that they mentioned here, they say be wary of any clinic that feels like a PT mill. So you should not be quickly passed off to a rehab attendant or aid. This is very true. And they say, you should spend at least 15 minutes with your physical therapist. That's like at a minimum, to be honest with you.
Obviously the clinics that we work with, they're primarily just working with people one on one. If it's most people, it's like an hour, right? So you're spending 60 minutes with somebody that is the actual clinician. And maybe it's a half hour appointment if they're follow ups, for some folks but a lot of people, it's just, an hour visit.
And what's interesting about that is if you really think about the amount of money that you're spending for time with this provider like I had to go to the dermatologist, I don't know, two years ago basically I was on a snowboard trip and I didn't have thick enough socks and my foot got so cold that.
My like two of my toes were red for two weeks and I was just like getting concerned when I went to go to the dermatologist, they were like, oh this yeah, this is what happened. Whatever it will resolve on its own and it did but I was there in the dermatology's office dermatologist's office for like I don't know.
First of all, they were 30 minutes late, right? Then I ended up talking to this person for about five minutes. And and when they You know when they were done right they left I went and I went checked out and I'd pay out of pocket like we have Such high deductible with our with our insurance that it's very rare that we don't just pay out of pocket So my cash rate for this visit was like 250 bucks, right?
So it's 250 dollars for five minutes of this person's time and I'm, just like dang, that's just I don't know what the hourly rate on that is astronomical well over obviously thousand dollars an hour and I can go to a PT for an hour and let's say it's 200 bucks like and i'm gonna get so much more Individual attention i'm gonna learn more about what's going on they basically gave me a handout and told me You know, all right, go away.
There's nothing else we can do here, but they didn't even really answer questions that I had. I still was like, not sure what was going on. And it was a lot of money, right? You gotta think if somebody's, coming in and they're paying, I don't know, a hundred dollar copay or something like that, like a high copay for 15 minutes of somebody's time, they're really paying 400 for that hour of time with with the PT.
So this is where a lot of people are starting to gravitate towards. wanting to be one on one with a professional. And I see this in a lot of other professions, right? So functional medicine is maybe one of the better sort of adjacent examples that you can use for this. So my sister in law is a functional medicine nurse practitioner.
She's my, what I would consider primary care doctor. She's awesome. We look at, blood panels. We'll look at lifestyle stuff. All kinds of anything that I want to do proactively, that's a little bit more in depth than just like a general practitioner. I work with her on that stuff.
And I want to seek out somebody and a lot of people are wanting to seek out a primary care practitioner that is going to actually talk to them, spend time with them, listen to them, understand their unique problems, look at things, maybe A little bit more in depth as far as root cause is concerned with things versus treating with medication, right?
And I think we're seeing a big shift away from wanting to just have medication for everything versus Let's talk about these other things that maybe food or sleep or stress management or movement these variables that we can You know that we can change in the body now more much more naturally Then medication or just waiting until there's a problem, right?
And a lot of times with primary care in particular, it's just I don't know. There's not much I can do here. You have to, um, okay, cool. See you later. Like occasionally I have to go to the VA hospital to do a, Check in with my primary care and every time I go there, it's just like a huge waste of my time.
Like they just look at my blood pressure. They they pull blood panels, but they're like very few numbers. They don't even really look at it as long as within normal limits. They're not looking at like optimal values for someone my age and my goals. They don't even talk to me about that stuff, right?
They're just like, Oh, okay. You don't have, These terrible problems. See you later. And that's basically it. So in this article, again, what I thought was really interesting is they're making a case for seeing physical therapists proactively, and they're positioning them as this Swiss army knife of health and wellness providers.
And for me, what's interesting is I've seen this in a couple of different Places outside of the U. S. and outside of just traditional healthcare systems. So one was when I just, I first gotten out of the military, I had an opportunity to teach down in Australia and I was down there for about two and a half, three weeks teaching at a number of different gyms down there and a couple of different contracts that we had.
And one, one of the gyms that we were at was in Sydney, Australia. And I remember over lunch we had a number of this was a number of like clinicians, but then also just like people that were interested in learning more about how to take care of themselves from a movement standpoint.
So I had this lady that I was talking to over lunch, not non, a non clinician. She was a, like just recreational runner, right? She would run like half marathons. And when I was talking to her about the Australian health care system, there's a socialized system, right? So it's a bit different than here.
But she was telling me, the way That her healthcare plan was set up was that she had a certain amount of money that she could use for like physiotherapy, right? Or what they call like what we call PT, they call physiotherapy. And that she typically would use it proactively when she was getting ready to train for a race.
So if she was going to train for a half marathon she would go in at the beginning of her training cycle and she would get her physio to take a look at her, everything that's going on. Whatever. Hands on stuff. They felt that she needed help build out like a corrective exercise program around her training.
Take a look at the volume that she had and all this stuff. And and she would do that proactively. And when I was talking to her, I was like, wow, that is refreshing to hear that somebody is being proactive with trying to stop, these physical these injuries from happening and not reactive.
And she thought it was very odd that anybody would wait until they got hurt to then go see somebody, which, really does. It really doesn't make sense if you think about it. If you were to say, okay, I'm going to drive my car until the check engine light comes on, or I'm going to drive my car until it breaks down.
Yeah. Then I'll go get some preventative maintenance work done on it. That would really seem odd to someone, right? Like it doesn't make any sense yet for most of us, most people treat their cars better than their body. We wait until there's a problem. We wait until we've dug ourself a big hole and then we go and try to get help to get out of it.
And it was interesting to talk to this person about how she was viewing physio and and the position that they were in, which seemed much more like a direct sort of a musculoskeletal primary care provider, which the second sort of example that I've seen this in as well. Is in the military and the military, again, what's interesting about these two settings is they both are more of a socialized medical setting.
So with that, there's pros and cons. One of the big cons of the military is you obviously pay for it with your time. It's, it can be a huge weight to get in to see certain subspecialties and things like that, because we're just we're understaffed, honestly. Like we just don't have as enough people.
And, but one of the, one of the pros for providers at least is you get a ton of responsibility. This idea of being a primary care musculoskeletal provider is there's nowhere that's more true if that is the case than the military from what I've seen. The reason is. We have a federal practice act that is obviously we have to be licensed in a certain state but the things that we can do are dramatically Like our practice act is far more liberal, right?
I mean we can prescribe medication we can Order images. I was taught how to do subacromial, injections for impingement like all kinds of stuff and a lot of it has to do with the fact that You in some cases, you might be the only medical provider around, aside from medics, and you might have a general practitioner, if you're lucky, or a PA but usually a PA and a PT.
The you end up seeing a lot of things that also fall into primary care. And the way that it works is, in sick call. So sick hall is where if you're hurt during physical training hours in the morning You can go and be seen at a clinic during that time, but it's basically you show up you stand in a line and then You get assessed you get evaluated and it's not the most it's not I wouldn't say it's the best care in the world Like when I was running sick call Like the last duty station that I was at It was attached to the airborne school down at Fort Benning and I would see just some warnings, it just depended on how many people were there, right?
If there were three of us, then we might have 30 people. We're going to see 10 people each within, in an hour and a half. And a lot of this is like triaging musculoskeletal things. But sometimes it would just be one provider. So you got one provider and they're still going to be 30 people show up.
Sometimes it would be 15. Sometimes it'd be more than that. It's maybe like 40. But you got to see all these people during this time and you have to quickly figure out which ones need to be limited in movement, which ones need to go see primary care, which ones are good to go. And there can get back to training.
In a very short period of time but I would see real weird stuff that would come through from a primary care standpoint in a young, healthy population, mostly so we got a ton of training in, in, in primary care, what to look for, what questions to ask when to refer over to PA and vice versa, because sometimes people would end up over there and they need to come see us.
So they would think they had something that was. Primary care, but it was musculoskeletal. They would come to us and vice versa. We'd have to take somebody from our clinic and move them over to primary care, but you'd have to look for those things. So understanding primary care was a really important thing because you don't want to miss a legitimate.
musculoskeletal or systemic problems that showed up as musculoskeletal. Like I caught cancer on multiple occasions. I caught weird systemic things like limb girdle, muscular dystrophy, and like very strange things that did not belong in my clinic that you might've just passed off as Oh, okay.
Just whatever, not a big deal. Get back to training. And then that's a real, that's a big miss. That's a problem. With. With positioning ourself more in this lens of primary care, muscle, skeletal practitioner or this Swiss army knife of health and wellness, or to be the quarterback of somebody's health and wellness.
I think this is a fantastic place for the profession to go, but understand that the liability associated with that increases as well. You're asking to be able to have more of an opportunity to work with people. With less restrictions, less referrals needed, less gateways in order to get in to see you.
But at the same time, you're going to see more stuff that doesn't belong in your clinic and you need to be aware of what to look for and understand what to do and not do. And you can't get lazy with that stuff. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a long time listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes wherever you listen to the podcast.
And please leave a rating and review. This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast for more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. So when I think of going this direction there's a couple things that number one most people that I work with on the business side, they would be more than happy to be in this position.
Send them to me first. I would rather refer them to primary care if needed. That is a more efficient route. That's why they do this in these socialized medical systems, because it costs us money. We all know practice acts don't necessarily have to do with what's the most efficient. It's who has the biggest lobbyist group.
So that's why some states are not as liberal as others in terms of, Now people being able to go straight to a provider, but either way, if that's what you want to do, then you need to make sure that you are spending time learning about primary care, learning about, what are these systemic things, these red flag things that don't need to be in your office.
And you also have to have a referral network of people that you can then send folks to that are appropriate, to be seen by. Whoever it is that need, they need to go see. So that's a, it's just a bigger responsibility in a lot of ways. The other thing too, is if you want to be this Swiss army knife, of providers, then, you need to really understand.
A few other things besides just manual therapy and exercise. And this is if you want to, in particular, have long term effects and a long term relationship with patients. I would say When we look at why people will come back to work with you, there's, there are two, two big ones, which is just referenced.
And that is if you can do manual therapy and make them feel better, there's a lot of value in that a ton. And don't listen. I get it. Go look at the research, make your own conclusions of what you want. Okay. And there's definitely a group of people that will say, Manual therapy doesn't do shit, okay?
And maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong, I don't know. I can tell you, from a business owner standpoint, that people value and people enjoy feeling better when they have hands on work done to them. Case in point, think about how many massage therapists, chiropractors are out there, acupuncturists are out there.
and can be quite successful just with that. So manual therapy, human touch has a lot of value to it. I can tell you as somebody as if I'm a patient myself, absolutely. I think I respond best to a mixture of manual therapy and corrective exercises. That's what I respond best to. And if they can be done in conjunction, the same visit, I see a ton of value in that.
So a lot of people do. And if you don't have strong manual therapy skills, then you learning those, getting better at those, whether it's some sort of manipulation, dry needling, some sort of soft tissue, like release technique, like an ART, kind of thing. People love that stuff and they will come back for it.
So you'll have a better business model because of it. So there's value there. The other thing is people value Physical appearance. So if you can help somebody get stronger, you can help somebody lose weight. You can help somebody get back to activities. I'd like to do that helps them live a more active, healthy life.
There's a lot of value there, right? So understanding how to get people to move better and how to actually get your hands on to somebody to improve movement patterns and decrease pain. Those two right there. That's going to be like 75 percent of what most people need to be able to do in order to have long term relationships with clients which is really important for a couple of reasons, because this person starts the article talking about how she cried when she graduated because she didn't have her physical therapist anymore.
That's somebody that was, in her corner to help her train and be active. People still want to do that, whether they're in college or not, they want to be able to Yeah, they want to be able to stay active. They want to be able to stay active with their friend group and do the things they like to do as far as their hobbies are concerned and all of that.
So you fit into that if you have the skill set to do and you're able to understand what people want to do and help them achieve those goals, right? So when we are able to build rapport with people and help them achieve goals, we build lifelong patience. Lifelong patients. I worked with people for, like the longest of anybody that I worked with was like eight years in a athlete's potential.
And we had that company for roughly eight years. I actually, and I owned it for eight years. We sold it still exists. It just hit his 10 year anniversary going strong. But there's people that I worked with from the very beginning. I'm talking like the first 10 people I worked with that I saw within the last couple of months that I was even treating patients.
And that's amazing because for a couple of reasons, number one, like they have somebody they can trust, they can come back to you and they can get vetted information. That's very confusing for people. There's a lot of different sources of information out there and they're bombarded. They don't know what to, they don't know what to think.
They don't know who to believe. There's so many people out there that want to tell you bullshit medical advice, like such terrible advice. It just because somebody. See the post on Instagram and they tell you, Oh, this research article says this, did you read the article or did you just read the post and then tell somebody what the highlight of it said that is the medical advice people get on a daily basis and it's stupid.
But. People don't know what to believe because there's so many things out there and it's not their fault. They're just listening to people they think they should trust, right? And just because your brother likes to lift weights doesn't mean you should listen to him as far as what supplements you should take and, what your sleep cycle should look like and whatever else, right?
Like it's, you should actually talk to somebody who that's their job. Like your brother might be, in sales, but he likes to bench press. And that's not where you should get all your information. So people like us are important because we can then pull together information that we can apply in context to that person and also make sure that we're not giving them bad advice and that there's not something more systemic going on.
Then you go talk to somebody else about it. There's a lot of value for that, a shitload of value for that. So people are looking for that. This article is an example of people looking for physical therapy. They're looking for solutions to their musculoskeletal problems. They're more sedentary than ever.
Most people are working from home, sitting at a desk all day. They're getting less and less steps. They're eating more and more processed food. They're drinking less and less water. They're getting less and less sleep. It's, they're turning the wrong direction. They're trying to solve all their problems with GLP once, which who knows what that's going to look like in a long over a long horizon.
It could be a miracle drug. It could be terrible. Nobody knows yet, but here's my point with this. There is a market for this that is growing. And if you are listening to this podcast, Your business is in a great spot because people are looking for professionals that they can get guidance from, that they can have a long term relationship with.
And they're looking for somebody that can quarterback their health and wellness. They can be that Swiss army knife that they need. And once they find you, they're going to latch onto you for as long as possible. As long as you're providing value to them, there's a few ways again, that you can do this.
Number one, we've already talked about your clinical skill set, especially when it comes to improving moving patterns and hands on things you can do that make them feel better and move better that there's a ton of value there. The other thing is to be somebody that is trusted and that listens to other people.
And makes them feel heard. Okay. Most people go to medical visits. And just think about my dermatology visit. I talked about I promise you that person doesn't remember a damn thing about me, but I remember that negative experience that I had there. And you think I ever went back? No. You think I'm going to send anybody else there?
Absolutely not. I'm not going to recommend it. I'm also not going to go out of my way and bash their clinic. I guess I am on this podcast, but nobody here, I'm not gonna tell you the name of it because I respect them. It's hard thing to do is run a business. But they didn't make me feel very valued.
It's not something I'm gonna go back and continue to go to. But if you can do this and you can be heard and you can listen, you can listen to somebody, you can hear what their goals are. You can help them gain clarity and achieve these things they're saying that they want to do. Then the question is what else do you want to do?
Okay. You want to get back to running five case. Sweet. You can totally do that. Like I had so many patients that came in, they thought they would never be able to do something, whatever, fill in the blank, this physical goal, pick up something without back pain, get back to running, play soccer with their kids again.
And all of a sudden they're back to the thing that they didn't think they were able to do. You're like a freaking miracle worker for them. And then you have the chance to say what else do you want to do? What, maybe you haven't even had time to think about it. Maybe you don't even think something was possible.
Oh you're back to running 5k. It's what else do you want to do? I don't know. You think I can run a half marathon. I've never done that. I've always wanted to fuck. Yeah, we can. Let's do it. That was my response to people. Hell yeah, let's go. Let's build a plan. Let's work on this.
Let's achieve this next thing. And for us on the business side, it's fantastic because it creates recurring business volume. Recurring revenue. Okay. Great for the business for that person. How many people stop trying to achieve things physically in their life past the age of 25, almost everybody.
There's so many people that just, they're like, no I'm done. I'm past my prime. That's not true. Talking about people can get into new things and achieve new things for the rest of their life They just need to start to set what those goals are and build towards them and they might need somebody to help them Clarify that and work towards it and make the right health decisions and hold them accountable This is where you can start to change people's lives Not just get their knee to feel better and that's this is the niche in which my practice functions so well.
And the reason that it's done so well over the last decade is because we solve long term problems and help people achieve things they never thought that they'd be able to do. And we do that through a combination of improving movement, improving sleep, improving nutrition, improving stress management.
These are the variables that we want to get into them along the way as we're helping them achieve these goals. And we might have to pull in other people. Let's say somebody's going through something really tough. Like maybe they're going through a divorce. It is not my place to sit there and talk to them about their divorce and what to do.
I need to have somebody behavioral health, Therapists, mental health specialists that I need to be able to pull in and say, Hey, this person's awesome. I think you should talk to them. I think it'll really help with the stress you're dealing with because we all know how that affects the body, right? Okay, let's talk about sleep.
Let's go through the basics. Let's hold you accountable on this. Let's change a couple of things at a time. If those things aren't changing. Or not changing the way that we want to see then maybe we need to get some sort of sleep specialist involved And get them a sleep study and to look at these other things or pull blood panels And see if there's anything internal that's going on that maybe is affecting this and that might be a referral out maybe for you, it's simple as understanding how to read blood panels and start that process with somebody and start to chip away at the low hanging fruit and then Refer them off to somebody else that can do a much, much deeper dive.
Or maybe you pull them you and you realize, Whoa, okay. There's some weird shit going on here. I need to get somebody else involved. get functional medicine involved. And there's a place for all these things to be referred back and forth. But again, you get a chance to be that central person. They can organize and disseminate what that information is in a clear way, even if they are working with other professionals, which in very, in many cases is what needs to happen instead of them just saying, okay, yeah, my doc said my a one C is high.
What does that mean? Maybe they didn't have time to talk to that person about it or really understand what they need to do and how do they change those things. And that's where you have to continue to improve your your own skill set as a primary care musculoskeletal provider. It's not just about injuries.
It is about the whole body. The entire body and this is the direction I see the best providers going regardless of what their doctorate or whatever degree is in regardless of what you know type of clinical provider They are starting to learn more about the holistic individual in these other buckets that maybe don't relate directly to their knee pain But indirectly probably do so if you can do that now all of a sudden You set yourself apart from so many other clinicians, especially the physical therapist.
Let's say somebody is in a network clinic and they're seeing 20 people a day. Do you think they have the time to sit down with that person and really talk to them about blood panels to talk to them about sleep nutrition or like sleep specifics and nutrition? Like they probably don't. They're just Jumping around trying to manage the huge caseload that they have dropped in their lap.
But if you're like my clinic and you work in a one on one setting in a out of network or cash based clinic where you have not only the time but you have the skin in the game You have the money people are paying you and when people pay you they pay attention That is the reality the outcomes that I would get in my clinic are so much better than I would be able to get if I Was in an in network clinic and it has nothing to do with me as a provider It has to do with I have the time and I have the buy in you have paid me You're gonna listen to what I have to say or you just hate money, right?
And there's some people that maybe are like that and they just honestly have so much money. It doesn't matter to them but for most people that's not the case If they're paying you 200 bucks an hour and you give them some advice of what to do You give them a program or a course They're going to do it.
They're going to be super compliant. They're going to get amazing outcome. And then they're going to think you're even better at your job. It's a, it's amazing flywheel of why we get such great outcomes with people. So when we look at the best way to tee yourself up going forward, I think the best way to do that is to really position yourself as this quarterback for people's health and wellness, or the Swiss army knife of health clinicians, this person that can be the central go to point for the things in their life, not just musculoskeletal, but for you to be somebody they can talk to about things like sleep and nutrition and stress management. And then you can be the person that refers them to the right other people. There's a lot of value associated in that you're saving them time. You're creating a vetted network of people for you and you can help refer out to, to get a better outcome for your clients.
That is valuable. That's super valuable. And it's up to you to find the best people you can possibly find to refer your clients to if needed. And if you can do that, they're going to trust you more than if you try to do everything yourself, they're going to refer more people to you. And those people that you're referring people to, because you think they're awesome are also going to then refer people to you because they think you're awesome at what you do.
And there's overlap though. There's there's area in which we will overlap. It's I can teach somebody how to squat. But a personal trainer can teach somebody how to squat, right? And does that mean that this is we're in a turf war over squat mechanics? No, it means that we both need to know these things.
But for me, it may make more sense for a trainer to take somebody through, actually like getting back into exercise because it's going to be much more Much less cost prohibitive for them to do it than for me to be their personal trainer That may not be where I fit best and for them If somebody actually needs to have hands on work done by somebody and get a better idea of mechanically what needs to be addressed They need to refer them over to us in order to do that Can I talk to somebody about nutrition and blood panels for sure?
but if it's something that is like What outside of my my scope of practice or something that's going to take a lot more time and effort and dive into it a lot more deep, I'm going to refer it out and vice versa. They'll do the same thing back to us, but for us to be able to have understanding and knowledge and all those variables, that is a great place to be because you put yourself in a position of significant value.
To the people that you work with in their life. And let's be honest, like the vast majority of what we're going to work with is going to be getting them moving better, and getting them feeling better, right? Getting them stronger, getting moving better getting them able to be able to do the things in the world they want to do, whether it be lifestyle things or whether it be physical, like athletic goals, whatever it is.
And those can continue to change. And if you have somebody that you're working with that wants to be a athlete for life, that you're gonna have a client for life, right? And that's huge for the business. So I see this as an incredibly important transition in the profession. And okay, this is just one little article.
You can say, okay, not whatever, not that big of a deal. This is something that I've seen changing for the last decade. This is something that I, when I came out of school, like I graduated in 2010 and this is not like the conversations that we were having. This just wasn't it. I remember the first function like FMS.
Course I had whenever I was at school. So this, this is like 2009 and we had the guy, Johnny Owens, who's Owens recovery science, like the blood flow cuffs. Like he was one of our adjunct professors. He was working with a lot of soldiers at the Center for the Intrepid and at Brooke Army Medical Center at the time doing limb salvage work and amputee return to duty work, which is really cool shit that he was doing, but he was super into Functional movement screen and it was like voodoo to me.
I remember the first time they went through this I was like, I just don't understand this at all. And what does this have to do with somebody's knee pain? Like I didn't get it and we've evolved so much more to understand so much more about movement and training and it's not just like this myopic.
You have patellofemoral pain, this is what you need to, this is what's going on. It's just, it's no, the whole thing, man, the whole chain the whole moon pattern, right? The whole system. That incorporates all these other things like sleep, like we're in such a different place right now.
And it's been trending that way probably for longer than I even know, probably before, obviously when I was in school, but definitely I've seen a significant change over the last decade in particular. And the biggest change is that people are looking for people like us. People are looking for us.
When I started my clinic. People didn't know what the hell I was talking about like the education side of what I was trying to do with folks. It was hard for me to sell them to come in and work with me. Now people are actively searching for people like you. If you want to fill that role, if you want to function in that, that, that type of a role as a provider, they're there, they're looking for you.
So the education component is not. Nearly as hard and it's going to continue to get more and more Popular over the next who knows how long as people have these type of issues. You're seeing a lot of people move towards proactive health care and less reactive health care And we fit perfectly in there.
Not only that and i've been talking about this a lot, but i'm I've been looking into a lot more, artificial intelligence technology and things that we use in our company, but also things that I see that are being used within healthcare in general, I think it's actually an area of massive disruption that's going to happen in technology, but healthcare in particular.
When you look at professions that are the most resistant to those physical therapies in the top five of that, a lot of these are healthcare professions or their trade services, blue collar jobs, think of it like, like an electrician, a plumber but physical therapies right up there. So what a great spot to be, what a great spot to be.
You have this, the this tailwind of people that are looking for you and this tailwind of people like having a career that is insulated from one of the. Biggest technological changes that we've seen in our lifetime. The only other thing you can think of is like the internet.
It's probably as similar to this. And there's a lot of changes, positively negative, a lot of industry changes in terms of what people were doing before and after. And that's normal. That's going to happen no matter what, but you're in a spot where you have Like huge amount of insulation in a positive way with people that are looking for you.
What a great spot to be in. I'm so excited. This is just 20, 25. This is for the next, however many decades, that I can even think through who knows, actually, I don't know who knows what's going to look like 10 years from now. It's very hard to say, but definitely, for the next, Five years going in 2030, it's just such a great spot to be.
And probably for a significant time past that as well. So I'm excited for the profession. I read this article, and it's pretty straightforward, but I'm just like, man, it's, this is what people need to see. They need to see that we don't necessarily need to have people that are injured. It's happening already.
This is a good example of it. This, it validates what we've been working towards for a long period of time. It validates what people like Kelly Shoret have been working towards for a long period of time. Great cook has been working towards, for a long period of time, like these movement specialists that were talking about this stuff, before I was even, in PT school Good for them.
It's great to see that what they're pushing is really starting to become a bit more mainstream now and good for you for picking a profession where you get to help people with their, their their health longterm to be a, an advocate for them to be a a person that can help them achieve these physical things that are becoming harder and harder in a world where they have to do less and less.
Like they can get by doing less and less. And physically we're not built like that. So people need your help. So fantastic place to be. I'm excited for 2025. I hope that you're as excited as me. And if you have a business where you are trying to work with more of these people, you're trying to build your practice to, a point where you can grow a cash base or hybrid practice to sustain your own clinical schedule, to grow past yourself, to grow a clinic to a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue.
Plus. Like this is something that we help people do all the time. If you're looking to get some help on the business side and become a great business owner, and it's a great clinician head of physical therapy, biz. com. Take a look at what we have going on. Some of our case studies of people that we were working with.
And if you, if it makes sense, you want to chat with one of our. Advisors just pick a time to chat with them and we'll take you through our business assessment. And this is the benchmark you against all the businesses that we work with. There's hundreds that we work with actively and we take the benchmarks of like where they're at as far as new patient volume, as far as recurring revenue, as far as all these, things within the business that we see as foundational building blocks.
And we'll show you exactly where you stack up, what you need to work on and where you're doing well at. And even if it's just that, even if it doesn't make sense for us to work together, that right, there can be one of the most valuable hours that you spend looking at your business to get a clear idea of what you need to work on and what you don't need to work on in comparison to hundreds of clinics like yours all over the U.
S. So if that makes sense, head to physicaltherapybiz. com, pick a time that works for you, or just check out what we're doing, learn a little bit more about it and how we might be able to help your business. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next week.
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