Ken Ansell Dr. Hugo Pinto Dr. Joseph Armour Richard Lebert Dr. Timothy Scherz Kyle Neagle individuals who have structural problems like a tendon tear or disc bulge are asymp-tomatic. There is not one orthopedic test that I know of that is 100 per cent specific and 100 per cent sensitive. So what do we do when the orthopedic assessment does not tell us anything? Or what do we do even when it does? If we perform an or-thopedic test and it comes out positive, it tells us something is wrong. What it doesn’t tell us is why and how this hap-pened. This is where I believe functional assessment comes into the game. Pinto : Functional assessment is a way to observe the patient/athlete. When observing the patient, our main concern is to hear where the complaints and restrictions are, because that is what brings the patient/athlete to us, but mainly it’s to observe what the patient cannot perform. The functional assess-ment is based on, as the name says, ob-serving the patient perform actions that he/she normally performs on a day-to-day basis and since the complaints started they cannot perform them as well or at all. In terms of athletes, it’s watching them perform their sport/technical skill. Armour : Functional assessment-treat-ment is essentially a process of evaluat-ing a patient in order to uncover and pinpoint the individual’s altered or abnormal movement patterns and me-chanical dysfunction or motor inhibi-tion. Treatment needs to be individual-ized and focused at restoring lost adaptability and targeting dysfunction, not pain it self. Lebert : Functional assessment and treatments are an integrated method therapists use to improve the quality of care they provide for patients. Functional assessments are done by measuring a patient’s quality of movement and his or her ability to recruit muscles efficiently. Functional treatments do not focus pri-marily on treating the injured tissue, but instead on improving adaptability within www.canadianchiropractor.ca RCSS chiro oct14.indd 1 October 2014 Canadian Chiropractor 33 2014-09-16 7:39 AM
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