Manual therapy's marginal utility
By Siliang Zeng
Manual therapy's treatment techniques integrated a multitude of physical therapy modalities to address functional issues. In clinical settings, the majority of the treatment duration is a set time or with the ending time based on the experiences of the therapist or the practitioner. How long certain types of treatments are based on the patient's current status really needs still remains blurred. I propose an idea of finding a way to determine the marginal utility of a treatment's duration. Similar to if pain increases, then treatment is often ended. There should be a boundary between how long is the best treatment duration and whether am I over-treating a patient. An approach may be finding a symptom or symptoms occurring in a typical treatment to determine whether it has reached its marginal utility or not; ie when is the actual time to end a joint mobilization treatment on a nearly recovered frozen shoulder, could the joint become over-mobilized when the duration is too long?
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