David’s story
My 53 year old patient looked at me expectantly after I finished performing my last
assessment test. All I could hear was the air-conditioning, the Physio in the next treatment
rooms talking to their patient about knee osteoarthritis, my breathing, and the thoughts
“How can every test be painful? I’ve done a bunch of tests, and almost every single one was
painful. Now what? How am I going to tell her what’s wrong with her low back, and help her
get better, when I don’t have any idea?”
It was 2001, I was a new graduate Physio performing an Outpatients rotation at the local
hospital, and I felt completely out of my depth. There were too many body parts, too many
questions I had to ask, too many diagnoses that I seemed to have no idea how to make, and
nowhere near enough treatments that seemed to make any difference to patients' pain. It was
overwhelming, mentally exhausting, and the lack of improvements in patients' pain was pretty
demoralising.
I downloaded and used exercise programs in randomised control trials (RCT’s). I asked every
Physio I knew for advice on assessment, treatment or specific patients, read textbooks and
tried everything I learned with patients.
Conferences, weekend courses and evening lectures popped onto my radar. I enrolled on, and
later started organising courses on manual therapy and muscle energy techniques,
acupuncture, dry needling, anatomy, neurodynamics and pain courses.
Adding all these tools to my toolbox helped improve my treatment results, which built my
confidence, but I knew there was still so much to learn.
One major challenge I faced was trying to stay up to date while living on the Central Coast
of NSW, a regional area that’s a couple of hours from the closest face to face continuing
education courses in Sydney.
One night in the winter of 2009 I travelled to Sydney with a couple of Physio friends for a
one hour evening lecture on foot and ankle pain. The lecture was good, we had takeaway for
dinner, and got home at 11pm after a 6 hour round trip.
As good as the lecture was, a six hour round trip for a one hour lecture didn’t seem like a
sustainable, effective way to stay up to date. I knew if I was struggling with this, other
therapists must be struggling with the very same problem. There had to be a better way to
stay up to date without any travel.
I started working on solving this issue the very next week, creating and launching Clinical
Edge online education and the Physio Edge podcast in 2010. I really wanted to make it easy
for Physios to access the best Physiotherapists & presenters, stay up to date with the
latest evidence and develop practical skills that could be used with patients immediately.
Leading Physiotherapists and Physical therapists from around the world recorded webinar and
video presentations for Clinical Edge online education, and interviews for the Physio Edge
podcast.
I loved recording the Physio Edge podcast, and with more than 4 million podcast downloads to
date, I’ve really enjoyed sharing clinical info with therapists all over the world.
Our Clinical Edge members loved the quality, practical nature, and ease of access of our
online presentations, and I got a real feeling of satisfaction from receiving emails like
this one from Tracey: