Symptom modification of painful gait

Symptom modification procedure is common practice in the Physical Therapy profession. This procedure involves identifying the specific movement, posture, and/or activity that reproduces the patient’s symptoms. Historically diagnosis of musculoskeletal problems was based on examination which selectively provoked musculoskeletal tissues by compressing or stretching the various tissues to provoke the symptoms. This provided direction for…

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Analysis of Movement with Smartphone Video

Physical therapists are movement specialist according to the American Physical Therapy Association. Addressing issues related to the human movement system is what Physical Therapist do. The movement system is collection of systems (cardiovascular, pulmonary, endocrine, integumentary, nervous, and musculoskeletal) that interact to move the body or its component parts. Visual observation and analysis of movement…

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How to do the analysis of slow-motion video of human movement

Smart phone video technology provides significant opportunities to analyze human movement. There are four steps involved in using smart phone video for slow motion video analysis. Each step has considerations, challenges and barriers that need to be addressed. The four steps are recording movement; analyzing the movement; storing the video data; and retrieving the video…

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Knee Pain Wringing Out – Gait Deviation

Knee pain can develop because of a “wringing out”.  I am not referring to banging a bell ring, but the counter-rotation motion that can occur at the knee joint.  The knee joint consisting of the thigh and lower leg moves on three different planes of motion. The knee can flex and extend. The knee can…

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Back Pain Dilemma – Keep on Walking

Walking is commonly recommended by many medical professional associations for management of back pain. Walking is purported to be beneficial counteracting the potential deleterious effects of bed rest, maintaining functional abilities, stimulating use of spinal core muscles, keeping the general benefits of aerobic exercise, and providing pain reduction effects. Pain Walking can provide relief to…

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Body Proportions – Musculoskeletal Pain – Sports Performance

  The importance of knowing how tall we are is somewhat obvious. What is less obvious is the importance of knowing the proportionality of our vertical height. The ideal proportionality of a human body’s stature was defined by Leonardo da Vinci. The “Vitruvian Man” or “drawing of proportions of man” is the ideal human proportions…

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Pain on Bottom of Heel: Too Much Big Toe Motion

Pain on the bottom of the heel (Plantar Heel Pain) is a complex problem with variable diagnoses and explanations. And with variable diagnoses there should be variations in treatment. Unfortunately, the common treatment recommendations do not recognize such variability. For example, the universal suggested treatment for plantar heel pain is calf stretching and stretching of…

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