171: The Most Skipped Step in Assessment and Why It Matters Most (with Whitney Lowe)
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Why is the client history the most skipped yet crucial step in assessment?
Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner Podcast, a podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today. I'm Whitney Lowe and I'm Teluca. Welcome to the thinking practitioner. Thanks for joining us here today. I'm Whitney Lowe, and we are excited to welcome Jane as a new sponsor of the Thinking Practitioner Podcast. If you know us, you know that we are selective about who we partner with. We want sponsors whose values align with ours and who genuinely serve this community. And Jane certainly fits that bill. They are a practice management platform built specifically for health and wellness practitioners, which is simple enough. Enough for solo practitioners, but powerful enough for clinics and groups.
What really caught our attention is Jane's reputation for customer service. Real humans available by phone, email, or chat, even on Saturdays. That kind of support is increasingly rare and it says a lot about a company. So if you're looking to simplify the business side of your practice, check them out at a-t-dot. T V slash Jane. That's A-T dot TV slash Jane. And thinking practitioner listeners can get a free first month by entering the code thinking at checkout. So thanks for joining us here today. Um, Till is off again this week, and I'm going to be doing a solo episode today. And I wanted to focus on some key aspects of treating pain and injury conditions and look specifically about the role of the history, the role of that intake that we have with our clients, because this is so critically important.
So we're going to take kind of a deep dive on some key issues related to how do you take a Really effective history, why the different parts of it matter so much, and what kind of excellent information we can get for this that's going to help us become a lot more effective with our treatments when we're working with our clients. And one of the things that gets overlooked a lot is how important and detailed that history needs to be. There are various parts of our assessment process, and sometimes I see some practitioners focusing on uh almost exclusively on the physical examination components of the assessment and and even speaking about assessment as if saying like uh oh i've done my assessments with my with this client meaning what they're really talking about is they've done a bunch of tests or physical examination tests with them but the reality is the most important part of that assessment process is really the subjective information that you get from your client that
Initial history. And so this is what we want to zero in on. It's like, how do we take a good history? What kind of information do we get from that? And where can we really use this to benefit ourselves much more effectively as we make our clinical practice aimed at treating these various people who are coming with so many pain and injury complaints for us to address? So here's where we see one of the problems kind of getting started. A lot of the therapists will sort of Begin treating their clients, just, you know, maybe focusing, just asking some basic questions at the beginning. And maybe your client says they've got shoulder pain, or maybe they say they got a pain down their upper extremity into their hand.
And so then your attention goes to those places and you just start working on where it hurts. But really, we want to be asking a different question, not so much just where it hurts, but why it hurts. What's the reason going on there? Because this can make make a big difference in where the problem is really originating from, what is the nature of that problem, how is it going to respond to the work that we do? How might we actually aggravate that problem with the work that we're doing also? These are all critically important questions that we're going to try to identify here. So with the various parts of that assessment process, again, I'm as I sent you I want to I want to sort of sort of zero in on the history taking process.
And we're going to use a framework
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Chapters
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