I totally get what you are saying fiveo, and I agree with you. I think that what some people, including myself, have a problem with is your style of delivery.
We do need to help the public have a more clear understanding of what we do, what our profession stands for, and the level of our training. You have to admit it is a difficult thing to describe in a sentence or even a paragraph because of the very wide variety of practice environments and even practice patterns in those varying environments.
We all think that we do the best practices, most are wrong and I am right (😉) but some have a more solid basis in science and common sense than others.
Our profession developed later than the physicians and at a time when we really didn't have much education at all. We have evolved tremendously since then but the structure of the system was set up before we had the training that we have now and because of that, the MD/DO is held responsible for everything medical both legally (practice acts) and financially (insurance company internal policies). This is an outdated system like much of our health care delivery system is. The legal part is shaping out the way it should with more and more states adopting direct access laws, the insurance companies are changing slowly in spite of AMA opposition. You have to admit that not all PTs should be given the responsibility of direct access. There are plenty of uninformed, behind the times, journals piling up unread PTs out there. Some of them are CIs for multiple PT schools. I don't want those folks deciding if my back pain is mechanical or because of some visceral disease because they just don't keep up enough with regard to validity and reliability of their testing and treatment.
We need to keep plugging away but we will win more converts and educate more people if we don't turn them off with dismissive and derisive tones.
