The Fallacy of Gray

July 9, 2016 Kenny Venere

The idea of embracing uncertainty is a popular one in the physical therapy community and for good reason — the clinical environment is complex and our patients even more so. This complexity makes it difficult to determine what might be contributing to someone’s pain or what treatments actually produce meaningful effects — pulling any sort of signal from the noise is quite hard. This awareness of uncertainty in our clinical practice can help improve our judgement and maybe even reduce mistakes in our reasoning (such as hasty generalizations). But as they say, the difference between medicine and poison is the dose.

Are We Too Evidence Based?

July 3, 2016 Kenny Venere

I have seen a growing sentiment on social media that the profession of physical therapy is becoming overly focused on evidence at the expense of empathy, compassion and communication. I believe this to be wholly unsubstantiated and a misguided way to appear more patient centered. The idea that closely adhering to evidence based practice stymies creativity, stunts empathy and promotes a form of clinical autopilot is a false one. Our patients deserve the highest quality care possible and it is evidence that best informs us what that care should actually consist of. Further, the idea that we as a profession follow evidence too closely is thoroughly contradicted by literature assessing our adherence to clinical guidelines, our use of evidence based interventions and the translation of evidence into practice. If we as a profession have a problem with empathy or lack of patient centeredness, it is not because we are following the evidence too closely.

The Importance of Argument

May 17, 2016 Kenny Venere

Argument is a essential piece of critical thinking and as a profession grounded in science is unambiguously necessary for the advancement of physical therapy. This is because science is advanced by critique and from critique comes refinement and progression. With this in mind, it is distressing to see so many of my colleagues claim that we need to “stop arguing” — Part of the issue might come from semantics surrounding the word “argument”, but I think the bigger issue is something a bit deeper than that.

Getting to Know Your Idealogical Immune System

February 21, 2016 Kenny Venere

Jay Stuart Snelson describes the ideological immune system as a system that “resists acceptance of any new ideas that would overturn any of our old basic ideas.” The idealogical immune system highlights the fact that change is hard, especially when that change comes along with a heaping dose of cognitive dissonance and contradicts our previously held beliefs.

Folk Numeracy and Physical Therapy

February 12, 2016 Kenny Venere

Michael Shermer coined the term “folk numeracy” to describe human’s “natural tendency to misperceive and miscalculate probabilities, to think anecdotally instead of statistically, and to focus on and remember short-term trends and small-number runs.”