Just bit about how I got to this point.
During my time as a Physiotherapy student, I worked as a Personal Trainer and Gym Instructor at a very large Auckland gym. Training for Athletics (Hammer & Discuss) under the guidance of one of New Zealand’s top coaches and qualifications in coaching had set me in good stead for training others – and I loved the effect that could be gained.
I started my clinical career as most Physiotherapists would, I qualified and realised that I really didn’t know as much as I thought that I did. This was brought home to me in my first 8 months of working in a rural South Island practice where we saw literally every kind of condition a Physiotherapist could be asked to treat. After this I moved to Auckland and took on a number of more senior roles in private practice there.
After a significant injury, I ended up off of work with a reconstructed thumb (a big deal for a manual therapist) and so focused more on Sports & Exercise Physiotherapy, working with rugby teams, basketball teams, individual athletes and patients with Chronic Pain disorders. It was during this time that I was approached to work for New Zealand’s national level funder of accident injury rehabilitation.
My time there was split between; considering if treatment requests were for appropriate treatment modalities given a specific patient’s needs and stage in rehab, providing comments on Medico-Legal issues, providing education to providers on how to deal with the funder, providing education to Medical and Clinical providers on causation and the role of trauma, being a representative on professional body panels and educating/training new clinical advisors in the role.
Throughout this time I saw a huge variance in what treatments were being provided, by allied health as well as medical and even surgical providers. Some of these were new and cutting edge, some were just complex ways of charging more money for less effective treatment. I also realised, while I have colleagues out there with significant post-grad qualifications, critical thinking was not always present in those clinicians. Sometimes, all a critical thinker would need to be was someone with the ability and background understanding – perhaps, Just A Physio would do?
When I left this role I returned to my home town in Rural Tasman Region at the top of the South Island (NZ) and wanted to provide some evidence based treatment in a region littered with alternative practitioners. Part of this included trying to collaborate with other exercise professionals in the area, which inevitably lead me to starting this journey.
After investing a huge amount of time (and money) into a registered Personal Trainer, I was approached and asked to look into a “Scientific” programme that answered all of the questions of exercise and health – you know, like; Why is this client not losing weight but my other similar one is? How can I do exercise based on my genetics to resolve my diabetes? How can I use measurements to determine my genetics and then use that to decide where I should go on holiday to improve my health? What does my body type tell me my career should be? – so just the every day questions…
Needless to say, given two of the “Sciences” were Traditional Chinese Medicine (not a science) and Ayurvedic Medicine (sooo not a science), I recommended against getting involved with it. The response from the Personal Trainer was – “But it is what I want to do with my career!”.
This really was a turning point for me, I realised that people were engaging “Professionals” who were acting in anything but a professional manner and the waves of sciency sounding misinformation were achieving only one thing – the removal of money from their (sometimes ill affording) bank accounts. It was time to put some good information out there to balance the scales. I then met a PhD Exercise physiologist (based in Australia) and one thing lead to another – after putting off starting this page, doing some collaborative work meant I needed to take the plunge – and here we are!
Hopefully, at the very least, you get to hear a reasoned response/counter to some of the information out there. I intend to review the good information & articles as well as the bad, so please let me know if there is something that you would like me to turn the lens on and I will do my best. I won’t promise to say what you want to hear all of the time, but if I do the job right, you’ll understand more and be able to form your own reasoned opinion – so handy when discussing the misinformation so prevalent today.
Wishing you all a well-educated/informed Health & Fitness experience.
Az
