Why I Started To The Point

I want to share with you another story. This story happens after I graduated from RMUoHP as a Dr. of physical therapy. At this point I had felt like I was unstoppable, I was going to change the world and make a difference in the lives of my family, community and the American healthcare system!

During my journey to become a physical therapist I heard an amazing analogy of the current healthcare system, this analogy I heard from a chiropractor on a youtube video several years ago that I still remember to this day and want it to be a major guiding principle for To The Point.

The analogy went like this: You go walking everyday with a pebble in your shoe, it starts causing mechanical stress to the bottom of your foot which causes inflammation and pain signals to be sent up to your brain. You go and see your family doctor who meets with you for about 7 minutes and prescribes you with a pain killer and sends you home. It works for a little bit but after a few weeks you notice that the pain starts coming back so your doctor prescribes you a stronger pain killer. After a few years of this your foot starts to adapt to the mechanical stress caused by the pebble, it starts getting calloused and deformed. You go back to your doctor who tells you that they’ve done all they can, you’ve been on the highest pain killer they can prescribe so they refer you to a surgeon. The surgeon takes an MRI and says, yup, your foot’s deformed, let's cut the callus tissue off and set your foot bones with rods and screws, that’ll fix your pain. Consider for a moment if that patient had gone to a chiropractor who took off the shoe, saw there was a pebble, took out the pebble and your pain went away.

As a healthcare provider this is what I continue to strive for, to take the pebble out of my patient’s shoes and get them back to living their life pain-free. In most cases the pebble is usually muscle weakness or tightness, joint tightness or how you work or play. After finishing my degree I was 100% convinced that physical therapists are in the best position to assess patients for the pebbles in their lives when it comes to muscle or joint aches and pain. I was hopeful that the knowledge I had just gathered for three years was the answer to the question: Why is the American healthcare system so messed up?

When I started my first job as a physical therapist I had an awakening to a sad truth, physical therapists are also trapped in the healthcare system and insurance scam. Throughout this Blog series I am going to share some details that I think many healthcare providers and insurance agencies don’t want you to know, the more ignorant they can keep you the more money they make. What I experienced working inside of the system was a strong driver for me to want to try something different.

During my last rotation as a student doctor of physical therapy I was feeling confident in my ability to go out into the world as a licensed professional and improve my community. My clinic instructor was a great guy who, on my first day in his clinic, pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to learn during my last semester. There were a few techniques that I wanted to sharpen up but I was really interested in getting hired right out of school, I didn’t want to waste any time and I wanted to hit the ground running. I wanted to learn what would set me aside from other potential candidates for hire. He thought for a minute and told me about his ideal job candidate, that at the end of the day he trusts any doctor of physical therapy to take excellent care of his patients but a therapist that could do that, and be profitable to his business, would be his first pick. He coached me on the business side of running a clinic and how to maximize insurance reimbursements and increase average patient visits etc. all with the goal of maximizing profits from insurance.

All of this information was invaluable in helping me land my first job, what I learned in that last 3 month internship got me hired even before I had finished up my last rotation and as soon as I graduated I started working. Even though this information was valuable, and something that made me much more hireable, it warped my vision on what healthcare should be.

I eventually found myself in a job where patients were little more than numbers on a spreadsheet. I was expected to see a patient every 15 minutes for some treatments with high tech lasers and shockwave therapy then pass them off to the aides to continue working on exercises and other gadgets. In my first job I had 30 minutes with each patient and none of the equipment that my last job had but our results with each patient were better than our patients that were treated with the high tech lasers and shockwave therapies. On average I would see a patient about 8 visits at my first job without the technology, at the high tech job my average visits went up to 14 visits per patient. Well how could that be? Doesn’t better technology mean better and faster outcomes for patients? Not necessarily, and since then I’ve concluded that a patient’s best chance for success in therapy is the amount of one-on-one time they get with the therapist.

This opened my eyes to several problems within my own practice and the practice of physical therapy as a whole. Here we are trying to solve the problems of the American healthcare system but young idealism is crushed by corporate profit margins and insurance companies telling us what we can and cannot treat. One example of this was I treated a patient for TMD, a painful jaw, and had almost immediate success. The patient was pain-free in 3 visits and was able to chew food again without pain. He hugged me and let me know I had changed his life. He was depressed with the possibility of living off smoothies and soups for the rest of his life. A few days later I was pulled aside by my boss and asked why I discharged a patient after only three visits. I responded that he had a 100% recovery. My boss told me that next time I should try to keep the patient coming back longer to maximize the reimbursement we get from the insurance company. I felt like I was being punished for doing exactly what I should have done.

I knew that I had to make a choice, I could continue working in the therapy mills (as they are sometimes referred to) or I could do my own thing and redefine what therapy looks like and what healthcare as a whole could look like for my community and hopefully the nation.

Well, I made my decision, I was going to do my own thing and continue doing what I love without insurance companies telling me how or what they’ll pay me for and without my values slowly being ground to dust in a therapy mill. And so To The Point Physical Therapy was created! I’m going to keep pursuing my dream of improving the health and wellness of my community by finding and removing the pebbles in your shoes, saving family and friends from addictive medications or painful surgeries. We are committed to improving healthcare through price transparency, increasing accessibility through home visits and improving results by improving the standard of care. I hope you’ll join me in my journey to change the way you healthcare, just reading this blog has been a great start and there will be another blog coming next week to explain more ways we can change how we healthcare and improve the health of our families, communities and our nation.

Wishing you well until next time!

Clark Beck DPT, cert DN