The twitter universe has been plenty critical of this piece on Your Lower Back (a user’s manual) and the physical therapy specific recommendations and comments.  I am not sure why.

Many years ago, I observed a phenomenon about us physical therapists and our view of advertising or promotion of physical therapy-we are over the top biased, sensitive, and arrogant.  This leads us into being way too critical and mistakenly thinking that others who view the same advertising and promotional pieces think like us-they don’t.  This makes us much too critical of any PT who makes comments that in our view we don’t agree with-we need to lighten up.  We also begin to think of ourselves as Mad Men expert advertising execs-we aren’t.  Let’s let the professionals do their job and let’s do our part by promoting the profession where it counts the most-with our patients in being the best “hands on”, compassionate, caring professions on the planet.

While it is very easy to be critical of old APTA PR attempts (e.g. Couch Potato-ouch! or backpack PSA), the use of media corps and in particular the ability to get “earned” media (promotional efforts rather than advertising) is a sound strategy in my opinion.  Is the piece perfect? Of course not but it contains about 4 references to getting a referral or seeking a physical therapist.  It is not APTA’s sole responsibility to “brand” physical therapy-that takes collaboration and involvement of the larger body of the physical therapy community-only the minor of which are members of APTA anyway.

If you really want to get mad, contact the film studios who have represented PT’s as marriage breakers, philanderers, and as a pole dancing prostitute. How does that compare to Your Lower Back? Mad now?

Thoughts?

@physicaltherapy