02/16/2026
All PTs need to listen to the first 3 minutes of this podcast.
Have you ever said something and thought to yourselfâŚI wish I could get that back?
If you havenât, I have to ask, do you do any self reflection on your day, your own patient care?
I know Iâve made this mistake at least twice in my career and I fought myself in real time.
In my head it followed with self talk like âyouâre an idiot, what were you thinking, I can believe you just said thatâ.
In the first instance, I lost the patient. The patient self discharged and I know it was because of the words I used.
I created a checklist in my head that essentially says that if I say something that sounds judgmental of the person, then I have to apologize.
Itâs alright to have a conversation to judge actions of a person, but it canât be a judgement of the person.
For instance, (not the patient that I lost), but a real case:
Me: I want you to test the knee and do something that may provoke it, but donât go beyond turning the pain back on
Patient next visit: I turned the pain and it is much worse than it was last visit
Me: what did you do?
Patient: I did about 50 jumps off the high dive at the beach.
Me: (đ¤Żđ¤Ź) did you stop when it was provoked?
Trust me, I wanted to go off on the patient internally, but realizing that I have to accept part of the blame, we had a discussion about what to do next time and then proceeded to treat the inflammatory effect from going up and down the ladder 50 times and then the patient go better over the next couple of weeks.
Long story short, are we going back to assess how we treat and how we speak to patients?
Do we have the humility to understand that we donât have all of the answers and sometimes we need a Mulligan (the golf version and not the PT version).
Podcast Episode ¡ The Dr. John Delony Show ¡ 09/21/2020 ¡ 42m