Dr. Christina Prevett // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, join Modern Management of the Older Adult division leader Christina Prevett discusses reframing the conversation around post-operative guidelines for physical therapy treatment. Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes, or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION INTRODUCTIONHello everyone and welcome to the PT on Ice daily show. My name is Christina Prevett. I am one of our lead faculty in our geriatric division. I'm coming to you from the University of Ottawa, so if there's a little bit of background noise, that is exactly why. But today, what I wanted to talk to you about, and the reason why I'm on here a little bit early is because I feel like this is gonna take me a little bit of time to get through, is to start reconceptualizing our post-operative guidelines when we're thinking about not just musculoskeletal injury, but many of our post-operative protocols when we're thinking about early healing and early recovery. in the post-operative window. And so I just posted a reel on our ICE Instagram account that's talking about hip precautions and how we have research going back from as like synthesis of research systematic reviews of research going back as far as 2015 to show that these precautions that were intended to reduce risk of early hip dislocation actually don't do that and what they actually do is they exacerbate post-operative deconditioning and they increase fear of movement. And we see this all the time in clinical practice, right? Individuals go for surgery. They're given these restrictions. These restrictions are not evidence informed. They're never discharged. And what it does is it causes people to disengage with activities of daily living, with sports, with activities that they enjoy. They become more sedentary. And then downstream, we see that the amount of postoperative deconditioning is greater and their capacity to engage back into the things that they enjoy before surgery is less. You know, I've had clients that have said to me, I'm so much worse. Like, my pain is better, but I feel worse than when I went in for surgery. Like, why did I even get this done if I could have dealt with this surgery? And so over the last couple of months, I have really been thinking and noodling on this. I did a podcast on the pelvic section on our Mondays around how our pelvic restrictive guidelines around lifting are not evidence informed at all either. And that when we remove those guidelines, and we have now multiple RCTs that have said, you know, other than don't have penetrative intercourse for six weeks, when we say here are your buoys, and here's how you can progress based on how you feel. not only do you not see an increased risk of postoperative complications in those individuals with liberal restrictions, but they actually have a reduced pelvic floor burden in that postoperative window. And so that early recovery is actually enhanced. And so we have to kind of understand where some of these guidelines come from and how are we as a profession in allied health going to start pushing the narrative and where is our role in that because I think we have a really massive role. So the first thing that needs to be acknowledged that is really front of center when it comes to post-operative guidelines is that when we do research and we take surgeons and we have done cross-sectional surveys, not we other researchers, and asked, you know, where did these lifting restrictions come from? Like, where is your evidence? Or do you believe that your restrictions are evidence-informed? In our pelvic literature, we saw that 75% of urogyne surgeons recognized that the reason for their restrictions is because this is what they have always done. And only 23% of the surgeons surveyed believed that the restrictions that they were giving were evidence-informed. Now that is a massive problem, right? We so often in medicine come through the lens of let's avoid bad outcomes that we don't acknowledge that the lack of doing something by restricting a person's movement can actually lead to adverse outcomes down the road, right? Because yes, they're not saying we did X activity and caused X outcome, but the removal of activity, now what we know in all of our accumulated literature on the effect of deconditioning on trajectory of aging, clinical geriatric syndromes, and post-operative ...
