The Value of Quantitative Data: A Chiropractor's Perspective
Dr. Frank Wen of Integrity Chiropractic shares his experience using Plantiga to enhance treatment for his patients.
Despite the fact that there are significant advancements in knowledge when it comes to assessing and treating the human body, clinical practice still depends on many qualitative assessments that can often be subjective and not easily observed, felt, or always understood by patients. Quantitative assessments by clinicians are also limited by cumbersome or expensive equipment, which limits the degree of confidence a clinician may have in their diagnosis. The inaccessibility of these assessments also makes it difficult to determine whether or not they’re making meaningful progress with treatment, beyond alleviating pain.
Bipedalism is clearly one of the things that make us humans unique and is also one of the constant challenges that we humans must succeed at to perform many activities - basic or recreational. The longer a clinician spends treating the body, the more they will likely come to appreciate the relatedness of the many parts. Assessing human interaction with gravity and the ground not only makes sense as a basic step for many conditions, but also provides an extra degree of quantitative assessment to augment the clinician’s training and experience.
Plantiga helps accomplish this.
Plantiga is the first of its kind measurement device that fits comfortably and conveniently at the bottom of the feet. The measurement device provides linear and rotational acceleration measurement in 6 planes that is coupled to powerful AI in their cloud. As a result, Plantiga is not only able to gather useful acceleration data about the lower limb, but is able to determine spatiotemporal parameters of walking and running gait, as well as metrics of bounding movement which allows the clinician to help low activity level patients to the most elite athletes.
Combining Plantiga’s information with the clinician’s knowledge of biomechanics can yield useful insight into a patient’s movement strategy so that we can answer some questions such as:
· Is the patient accelerating too much or too little on certain parts of the gait cycle?
· Is the patient displaying a difference in step and stride lengths between both legs?
· Is the patient really loading more on one limb than another?
· Why is the patient feeling more weak or dominant in certain muscles in the lower limb?
The underlying reason to all these questions may be due to an injury, mobility issue, or a difference in neuromuscular drive and muscular development. By being able to collect quantitative data, this allows the clinician to be able to form a more complete hypothesis as to the client’s problems, as well as allows them to gauge if their treatment or training program is achieving its intended result.
All in all, this allows the clinician to go beyond treating pain and help the clients achieve optimal function, which is the ultimate goal.
Guest Author- Dr Frank Wen DC
I've been on a mission since day one to deliver honest, affordable, quality care. That means in my clinic Integrity Chiropractic, you're going to get treatment based on scientific research and my clinical training and experience. Every body is different, as should every treatment approach be.