I've thought about starting a blog for a few years, but have yet to have the time, Corona times make this much easier. Coincidentally I paid my student loans off during this time as well. I told myself to give it awhile to see if my frustration with the profession waned without paying an additional mortgage every month, it didn't. The title the bitter pysio is a slight misnomer as I am generally a happy and content person, but someone needs to speakout candidly on the state of the profession. The title is moreso to catch the eye and is a play on words with the other blogs/personalities like the sportsphysio, the honestphysio, the kettlebellphysio, and the running physio. These are all great sites and I encourage you to go and check them out.
I've started this blog specifically to discourage those on the fence about joining the profession and generally because I'm bored. If it is your sole passion in life to be a physical therapist and you just can't sleep at night without being one, well then go for it, if you just want a good job in the medical field that's enjoyable, stable, and somewhat interesting there are a host of other options that require less time and less money. The bitter angle comes about because I often reflect on the time it took to achieve the DPT, the money I spent, and the true lack of value the education has provided me. Let's break each of these topic down shall we.
The money I spent,
One often counts the total of their student loans as the price they paid for college. This is only the tip of the iceberg. School costs you time, time not working a full time job, time your undergraduate loans are accruing interest, your un-subsidized loans accruing interest from your first day of grad school, prolonging renting vs buying a house, being forced to participate in the college book scam, and all the expenses associated with living while going to school. How about we do some back of the napkin math. The average tuition for physical therapy school is 75,000, lets add living expenses at 20,000 a year, books 1,000, average interest(5.8%) at the average undergraduate debt (32,731) comes to 2,000 per year. This is total of 144,000 in student loans for graduate school and 38,000 in undergraduate by the time of graduation for a grand total of 182,000. Paid back over 30 years this is 1,127 a month. You will eventually pay 405,720 There are options for PSLF, and loan forgiveness which i suggest you look into. These levels of debt are unconscionable and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a generation of debt serfs.
The time it took to achieve the DPT,
7 years to become a physical therapist is truly absurd. I read online how therapist can't believe patients scoff at them when they are told it takes the better part of a decade to give them basic exercises and a rub their back with mineral oil, perhaps one should reflect on this and grant that maybe the laymen has a point. I actually enjoyed the first year of physical therapy school. It was difficult, we dissected cadavers, took very difficult courses taught by very knowledgeable practitioners in their respective fields. After the first year to year and a half of our basic core classes I noticed a bit off fluff started to trickle in. I wrote it off as being required and part of the graduate curriculum and "must be there for a reason". How wrong I was, the neuro classes became redundant, the manual therapy classes more implausible, and the fluff classes more prevalent. I truly believe we were ready to go after a year and a half at the most. I was told we had an imaging class and pharmacology class so we could eventually have direct access. Apparently the generation that transitioned from a bachelors to a masters was told something similar with different classes. Our youth is precious and fleeting, one shouldn't spend it locked in classrooms racking up levels of unplayable debt. The profession should have remained a bachelors, we always have and always will be an ancillary service in the medical model.
The true lack of value the education has provided me,
The smartest most insightful therapist I've met eventually admit that the profession is pretty much bullshit. Don't get me wrong there is immense value in exercise, the education we provide, and just getting the patients out of their sometimes depressing dysfunctional home lives. Whether or not that constitutes 100 dollars a visit is up to the auditors and your ability to craft a note on the EMR system. In school we're told we correct motor control, motor planning, imbalances, fascial adhesions, trigger points, spinal/pelvic misalignment, and so many other things I've forgot. Turns out none of that is remotely true. Our special tests are not that special, all manual therapy is bullshit, functional training isn't a thing and so on. At best we encourage people to perform basic exercises and with natural history and regression to the mean people no longer have pain. I feel most everyone initially becomes familiar with physical therapy through the outpatient setting so I'll save SNF's, hospitals, and rehab centers for another time. Just really compare your skill set, responsibility, and salary to an NP, PA, or really any other doctorate level in the medical profession (chiro's don't count and aren't in the medical profession lol). We're the "doctors", but somehow we end of grovelling to them during lunch meetings for patient referrals, funny isn't it?
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