Serving Tacoma - Olympia
and The South Sound Region
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A Holistic Practice Based on Embodied Neuroscience, Introspective Learning, & Effective Action
Advocating your Primary Care Doctor
Advocating your Primary Care Doctor
YOU HAVE CHOICE OF SELECTING YOUR OWN PRACTITIONER For PHYSIAL THERAPY (PT)
The economics and politics of healthcare administration and resource allocation in the modern era has indeed created widespread logistical challenges in primary care medical practice ( i.e. MD’s DO’s and ARNP’s practicing family medicine, internal medicine, and geriatrics, among other specialties
) such that it is now quite rare to find independent clinics wherein physicians can maintain separate autonomy and branding rights of ownership by hanging their own shingle. As a result, the vast majority of physicians in clinical practice are now consolidated under competing hospital / medical center conglomerates. This has separate advantages and disadvantages to caregivers and patients alike.
For example, your limited insurance benefits for physical therapy might also be subject to an added “Facility Fee” if your outpatient physical therapy visits occur within a larger hospital system’s ownership of site location or affiliation, vastly eating-up your limited benefits unnecessarily to the expense of administrative overhead. So you might want to ask about this.
Depending on training, preference, or contracted arrangement, your physician may assert an obligation to constrain or limit physical therapy referrals to within the hospital systems for which they are employed and /or have vested affiliations of merger or acquisition with other larger, multi-chain conglomerates. Or, others may simply believe that ‘all physical therapy’ is essentially the same set of administered procedures, techniques, and protocols anyway – so just go where it is convenient or accessible to the patient’s work or home.
Like choosing a fine restaurant, we urge you to choose the highly trained, independent and multi-talented specialty chef with broad attendance, limited seating, confident financial commitment, and unique reputation - in lieu of the express location, predictable recipe, and franchised-ownership that might accrue more complacently and uniformly through the usual cadre’ of line cooks.
Subject to their training and professional development, your physician and/or surgeon most likely subscribes to the higher caliber of treatment applications and interventions - and has your best interests in their heart and mind for individually supporting your best and most optimal healthcare outcome. But in the busyness and automaticity of it all, it might just be your responsibility to remind them of pause to review some alternate and credible treatment options that might exist outside their usual system, and to advocate these for yourself as well.
If your situation is recurrent or persistent despite repeat medical consultation, or is otherwise vague and confusing to usual diagnostic criteria, we hope you choose “Physical Therapy at Alliant.”
