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What does a physiatrist do?


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Division Director PM&R

Answer transcribed from Brightway's interview with Dr. Thomas Franz:


Sure, well, a physiatrist or a specialist in the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation works really to help people with conditions that can't necessarily be cured but can be treated through a combination of medications and therapies. And by therapies I mean physical therapy, occupational therapy, cognitive retraining or cognitive therapy, speech therapy, and we have a broad base of training in both musculoskeletal and neurologic conditions.


We treat both, for example, strokes, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries as well as people with trauma, somebody who had a traumatic brain injury might also have a dislocated hip or a fractured spine, and during our training we learned how to help people recover from those injuries and regain and the emphasis especially is really is on restoring function as much as possible.


So that a person can be made independent through the use of some sort of technology, then that is fine because the goal is to get them back to doing things for themselves as much as possible, and if they can be restored completely obviously that's ideal but that's not always possible right now.