Advances in back pain diagnosis and exercise prescription
Physiotherapists frequently face challenges when treating patients with back pain, a symptom that requires differential diagnosis and skilled management.
In this one day course Dr Lynn Bardin provides clinically relevant updates including:
1. Advances in differential diagnosis and diagnostic triage of back pain (a key clinical guideline): diagnostic updates, pathways of care in primary care management and referral to medical specialists.
2. Clinically useful diagnostic palpation of the lumbar spine and pelvis (theory and practical).
3. Biomechanics, patho-anatomy and clinical reasoning in therapeutic exercise prescription for back pain, particularly where structural pathology and functional limitation need consideration (with real case examples).
A focus on advances in key components of back pain management (both theory and practical) will enable physiotherapists to progress in diagnostic knowledge and practical skills for managing back pain and to liaise efficiently with the medical profession.
Learning outcomes
- Advance/reinforce their knowledge of back pain diagnosis and clinical anatomy
- Incorporate knowledge regarding 'red flags/alerting features' as diagnostic cues that influence diagnosis of serious spine pathologies
- Perform clinically focused palpation of lumbar spine and pelvis tissues/structures and consider findings of proportionate stimulus-response relationship versus hyperalgesia or allodynia
- Prescribe research-based or clinically-reasoned exercises for a variety of patient presentations. Typically these might include: functional limitation due to LBP, identifiable muscle weaknesses affecting movement, structural pathologies associated with movement adaptation/s
- Consider modifications to and progressions of exercise depending on a presenting patient's envelope of function and patient-specific needs
Prerequisites
- This course is only available to qualified and AHPRA registered physiotherapists.