Rehabilitation Medicine

Recently I was spending time with an older adult, and he said to me: “Life really doesn’t need to be that long. I’m already in my 80s, why would I still go exercise and work out? I already go out and walk several times a day, that’s already very good!” Honestly, the first half—“life doesn’t need to be that long”—stumped me. That’s a question about the meaning of life, not something I can answer in a few sentences in clinic. But the second half—“walking several times is enough”—happens to be my own specialty, and I’m confident about this: walking is great, but for an 80-something older adult, relying just on walking really isn’t quite enough. I’ll start from here in the rest of this post. ...

While prepping for the PM&R board examination, I used an engineer’s approach to solve an old problem for myself: how exactly should I practice past exam questions so I don’t forget them right after? I ended up building a small tool called “Exam Navigator,” and figured I’d tidy it up and open it up to share with anyone who needs it. 🔗 Live Demo (built-in demo account, ready to play): https://exam-demo.drpwchen.com 🔗 Source code: https://github.com/drpwchen/exam-practice ...

Last December, I took Neurodynamic Solutions (NDS) Level 1 and Level 2, taught by Michael Shacklock himself in Taiwan. Shacklock is the founder of the clinical neurodynamics system, and having him walk us through demonstrations step-by-step was a rare opportunity. After finishing both levels, I had taken over a hundred pages of notes, and it completely changed the way I look at “nerve pain.” To be honest, very few courses out there truly target nerves for treatment, which is one of the reasons I went out of my way to take NDS. ...

Ever since becoming a resident, looking for continuing education courses has hit the same pain point every time: ultrasound, manual therapy, foot and ankle, neuro, pediatric rehab… The courses are scattered across a dozen society and institution websites. I’d have to refresh the sites every few days, and I was never sure if I’d actually seen a particular post before. Later on, I set up web scrapers for these course pages in my Home Assistant at home to automatically notify me of new courses, and things finally got a lot easier. But realizing I’d be completing residency soon, this little tool sitting at home wouldn’t be able to keep reminding the junior residents. Figuring I had Claude anyway, I just asked it to scrape all the courses and announcements from these 17 rehab-related societies and institutions, aggregate them in one place, update automatically every 3 hours, and put it on the web for everyone to use. ...

If an accident happened one day and we could only stay in bed, unable to go anywhere, how would our lives go on? Life Bedridden with Disability I saw a patient with a high-level spinal cord injury on a home visit this month. Since an accident at 27, he can only move above the shoulders. Turning over, eating, bathing, and going to the toilet all require help from others. His life has become permanently tethered to his bed. ...