The challenges that my discipline is currently facing are in different areas like technology, social matters and education. In technology, physical therapy has a lot of kind of machines that are used to rehab people with different kind of disability. Also there is another kind of implements like balls, sticks, ropes, weights, etc. The big problem here is that the technological machines are too expensive, so most of the public hospital doesn’t have it, but you compare with a clinic, they have many machines that are very modern. If the physical therapist is working in place where there are not a lot of technologies, he can invent or imagine how he can do an exercise to patient with basic implements. When this occurs, you would know who is a good physical therapist.
Respect to social matters, I think that physical therapy is in a high level, but not so much like medicine. People when think in physical therapy, they always say: Oh! You are going to do a very good massage!!. But if you think in a physical therapist doesn’t do just that. This could be resolve with more publicity of physical therapy, but I really don’t know why people think that, because here in Chile we have an institution very important called “Teletón”. Teletón is popular and with this people can see the function of a physical therapist.
A Physical therapist creates a big connection with his patients, because he stayed during all the rehabilitation of the patient. At the end of the therapy, patients are always very grateful, because the physical therapist changes their lives.
In the third area that I mention at the beginning is education. Respect of this I think that the best place to learn physical therapy is in the University of Chile, because this university was the first one in all the country, so they have a lot of experience. If you decide to study in there, you can be sure that you going to be a excellent physical therapy. After university, you can make different types of training courses. In my opinion I think that these kinds of courses are good, but I would prefer to go another country to do some kind of these training courses, maybe would be better.