Upon your arrival at Smith Performance Center, our primary goal is to comprehensively understand the source of your pain or symptoms.
Our physical therapists initiate this by gathering information through a medical history form, conducting interviews about your experiences, performing thorough examinations, creating an initial list of potential diagnoses, validating our hypotheses through treatment, and finally, devising an initial home plan. This phase in our rehabilitation process is aptly termed ‘Diagnosis and Home Plan Development’. While not a creative title, it encapsulates the process our team undertakes.
A workable diagnosis is pivotal.
However, arriving at a diagnosis can be challenging due to various reasons. These complexities range from the diverse causes of pain (such as injury, inflammation, nerve-related issues, sensitization, psychogenic factors, and dysfunctional conditions) to individual-specific challenges.
Patients may struggle to explain their experiences, while others may not show rapid responses to treatment due to the absence of a clear injury. Some suffer from multiple factors contributing to the pain, where treating one might exacerbate another.
We term these challenges and they are prevalent in the diagnostic process.
5 Reasons You May Struggle To Get A Diagnosis And The Right Treatment
Here are the primary reasons you might encounter difficulties in obtaining a diagnosis and the appropriate treatment:
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- Compromised Feedback Loop: This occurs when feedback from our examinations, treatments, or home plans is lacking, delayed, or inconsistent—an unfortunate and common occurrence.
- Treatment Issues: These encompass scenarios where there’s either no response, inconsistent response, or a poor response to treatment methods.
- Injury Presentation: Ranging from highly irritable injuries that when triggered will not feel better for hours or days to multiple pain generators that are interacting to those presentations that cannot be triggered without specific circumstances outside of a session, the way injuries manifest can significantly impede diagnosis.
- Issues with Diagnostic Information: These include subjective, unclear, or conflicting information during examination and treatment, negative examinations, the absence of key signs, and the involvement of multiple contributing factors or tissues.
- Patient Reporting: Factors such as patient influence from online sources or previous medical advice, symptom masking due to medication during sessions, difficulty in noting bodily changes or cessation of activities causing symptoms can all impact accurate reporting.
Understanding and addressing these challenges is crucial for an accurate diagnosis and devising effective treatment plans.
