Patients sometimes feel they need imaging to: - rule out serious conditions; - guide their treatment; - get accurate diagnosis; - or validate their symptoms. There is an association between these beliefs and worse outcomes for pain and physical function Take a look at the #ResearchReport here ??https://ow.ly/zmW250TI9Wq #yourJOSPT #Imaging #Beliefs
I disagree because we cannot generalise pain just with the main illness for example arthritis, my mom had a really bad pain in her elbow, all the clinicians rejected her to give a prescription and saying that was a tendinitis related to her main illness and it wasn’t, was a osteomyelitis that was found after a MRI after she was hospitalised, now she is with a fracture and under a long antibiotics treatment, because clinicians didn’t want to prescribe any image to give her a clear diagnosis.
Often imaging is unnecessary and adds additional healthcare costs which could more wisely been put towards physical therapy treatment and recovery. As PTs we need to educate our patients more effectively of the appropriate reasons for needing imaging, especially when we clinicians can see how pain and a patient’s recovery can be negatively influenced by a result on a MRI. Furthermore, information on an MRI may not be clinically relevant to a patient’s case but when a patient sees or hears they have a positive “disc bulge” or “arthritic degeneration” those diagnoses can influence their mental capacity for recovery in a negative way.