Why crowdsourcing treatment advice almost never works
It’s exhausting when you don’t have a system to work within. When every patient that comes in is like starting over and not knowing what to do. Every treatment is guesswork and not knowing if something will work, or why it did one time and not another. Or worse yet, why what you’ve used before flared up this new patient.
Too often practitioners work on assumptions or guessing. They base treatment on what worked for a past patient, or because a colleague said it worked on their patient.
And much of these recommendations come from Crowdsourcing for treatment advice on social media. I started a group that has over 7500 members. But I had to get away from it.
The issue is, absent using a working system, crowdsourcing is ineffectual at best, and reckless at worse. It was the same thing over and over. Tons of people hopping in offering random suggestions absent any real case history, and it was all piecemeal. It was unhelpful and only confused the practitioner who posted the original question even more. The practitioner wasn’t taught how to fish. They were just fed temporarily. But even worse, the fish wasn’t even edible. (Ok enough analogies)
Can you imagine if your patient knew you were trying some random technique because another practitioner offered advice on Facebook?! When you think about it that way it’s pretty crazy.
But asking for advice CAN be helpful when it’s done in a certain way. Asking questions on a forum is much more valuable when it’s within a system and we’re speaking the same language. You can build within a system. You can make sense of the patient when you have a base of knowledge to work from. When someone posts a history of the patient, better advice can be offered. This also helps practitioners grow and not just have a crutch. I want practitioners to ask questions and learn more than just “here try this”. It’s much better to know the why and empower them to be more self sufficient…to grow into getting the answers themselves and knowing how to find them. Offering treatment advice is much more profound in this way.
A forum works much better this way and it works extremely well on our Locals community, where EXSTORE is the system that everyone works under. Its just a more responsible - and very effective - way of running a forum.
Size doesn’t matter. Having a smaller more effective community is better. The community continues to grow, but not just for the sake of growth.
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A little video I made showing why the ESTIM-II is better than the ESTIM-III.
@Exstoreman I have a patient who was just cleared by the surgeon to begin improving his elbow mobility 6 weeks post biceps repair (he had a full thickness tear)
He was immobilized in a sling up until now, but now that he is cleared — Can I proceed as usual with Exstore and some local renovation techniques if tolerable? Or should I be cautious of treating the biceps directly at this stage?
He was coming for lateral epicondylitis on the other side (poor guy) so we continued that and just did cold laser on the torn side up until now.
TIA!
Hi Doc @Exstoreman, patient presented with neck pain and twitching around scapula and tricep muscles ever since weighted seated rows at gym. The twitching is random. I’ve done exstore and cleaned up tropic changes, he had a lot between c1 to c 5 (splenus capitus). His neck is better but the twitching remains. I’ve checked for trigger points and tropic changes in the area of twitches but nothing obvious stands out. Today I went with perfusion and released neck muscles. Love your thoughts on this.
Sharing my little win treating my own right hand texting thumb yesterday with motor points for opponens pollicis, abductor pollicis, flexor pollicis. 3 needles, 5 minutes treatment with the pointer plus, slightly/very awkwardly with my non-dominant left hand :) and 85% improved today. I have just some residual ache at the 1st MCP, ulnar side. @Exstoreman what do you think of a high frequency intraarticular treatment, or what would be a good next step to get to 100%?
