I have a question specifically about manual therapy (chest percussions and vibrations) with patients who are post-cardiac surgery. Let's say someone is day 1 post surgery in intensive care, if the patient is medically stable (i.e. vitals are stable, pt is recovering well), how 'intense' can you be with your manual therapy? Is there a risk of doing percussions on someone post surgery? Obviously you want to watch the monitors etc. but what is recommended?
Also, in school they never told us how long you actually do percs/vibes for? Is there a time limit? Would you just keep doing it until the chest clears out (because that could be like 20 minutes!). I remember on one clinical session, the PT did them for like 2 minutes only, isn't that too short?
Anyway, I just want to clarify some of these things! Thanks for any help!
