Contrarian Truths of Physical Therapy

With some prodding by some of you out there, I have decided to randomly pick a collection of contrarian truths that exist within the profession.  These "truths" have been culled from various participants in courses, academics, colleagues, co-workers, and seasoned PT's.  They are best left for venues like this!  Previous posts included my rant on patient satisfaction and the worthless time spent in routine collection of them by PT practices.

Contrarian Truth #2:
We Get Dumber Every Day

If we graph time versus knowledge on a simple x and y graph with x being time and y being knowledge, we would all agree that as time goes into perpetuity that knowledge rises exponentially.  A simple reality of this would be our knowledge in technology.  It is estimated that what we know today will only be 5% of what we know in 30 years.  From this perspective, one can really say that the last smartest person in the world would be the one who had read and understood everything that had ever been in print at that particular point in time (some say Copernicus and some say John Milton). Without question then, our personal knowledge when graphed against the expanding universe of knowledge gets smaller and smaller each day.  So, the old adage that you get "smarter everyday" is really absurd-we actually do get dumber!

The good news is that the EBP notion of using "push" and "pull" tools of EBP as a measure to keep up to date as much as we can are readily available.  Articles and references that several of you post assist greatly and in our physical therapy world to the benefit of many patients.

I have come to believe that EBP is not really a medium for espousing what we know rather it is an admission for the profound amount of material that we don't know-and fortunately gives us tools and resources to find answers.

Larry

 

Comments

[Britt]

Larry,
ONE thought on the expanding universe. Knowledge, particularly information, is expanding exponentially; however, theoretical constructs shift and modify and, on occasions, are usurped by better, more inclusive constructs (The Kuhnian paradigm shift). I don't know about the full implications of the personal knowledge relative to this Tofflerian information boom and 'future shock' of technology. It is reasonable that we have a handful of schematae that work in most situations in our world.
I like the information push idea. I believe we have the reassurance that we aren't getting dumber and dumber because of mounting data.
Lester King, former editor for JAMA, noted that 100 to 2,000 yrs ago people were as intelligent (or more so, if you follow Jarod Diamond in Guns, Germs & Steel) as we are or will be.
Britt