Bring Manual Therapy to West Africa
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Bring Manual Therapy to West Africa -
My name is Matt Booth, and I am a physical therapist in Boise, Idaho.
I have been fortunate to be invited by a physician friend in Burkina Faso, a country in west Africa, to help teach a new model of assessment and treatment for musculoskeletal pain, the Fascial Distortion Model (FDM). We will be holding a training course in FDM in November, 2016, for physicians and physical therapists in a small town in Burkina Faso. This will bring enormous benefit to the community to teach their healthcare practitioners a style of fast treatment for relief of pain and stiffness that requires no tools or special medical equipment, as the resources in that area are quite limited.
Money raised for this trip will cover my airfare and costs during the trip (so I do not bring a burden to the local people), as well as fundraising for the startup of a local treatment clinic by Dr. Abdel Traore. Donations could also come in the form of clinic equipment, with donated money helping to ship these items to Africa.
One of my FDM practitioner friends in Africa remarked how he can have any of 60 different languages or dialects come into the clinic on any given day, but the clinic staff can only get by in 15 languages. FDM allows them to bridge the verbal gap with their patients, which is especially helpful without the assistance of a "Call-a-Translator" phone line. This is because FDM emphasizes translating the patient's often subconscious hand gestures they use when describing pain, stiffness, numbness, tingling, etc. He also remarked that in his area of Africa, "We will not have the money for a beautiful surgical suite, an MRI machine, or a CT scanner. We have our eyes, our brains, and our hands." With FDM, that covers most of what they need.
For those that want to know more about FDM - it is a medically-based model of assessment and treatment originated by an American physician, Stephen Typaldos, DO. Dr. Typaldos recognized over time with clinical experience that patient used their hands to describe different symptoms. In all, he categorized six different sets of conditions, each with its own clinical presentation and hand gestures. The hand gestures could be: pointing to a sharp painful spot with one fingertip, drawing a line of burning pain with the fingertips, pushing into a deep achy spot in a muscle with multiple fingertips, and more. Each condition is matched with a set of hand signals, which allows the clinician to employ the best manual therapy technique for that condition with less time wasted to guesswork. It amazes me that with all the breakthroughs in medical and physical therapy research, no other person I know of has identified the relationship between hand gestures and different musculoskeletal conditions.
The amazement and excitement I have had by adding FDM into my clinical practice, as well as seeing the astonishment in physician's faces when seeing the sometimes hard to believe results themselves is what drives me to help spread FDM to other healthcare providers.
I hope you are motivated to help spread FDM to a needy area of Africa, and to help start a clinic in a remote town that has almost no resources for medical care.
My name is Matt Booth, and I am a physical therapist in Boise, Idaho.
I have been fortunate to be invited by a physician friend in Burkina Faso, a country in west Africa, to help teach a new model of assessment and treatment for musculoskeletal pain, the Fascial Distortion Model (FDM). We will be holding a training course in FDM in November, 2016, for physicians and physical therapists in a small town in Burkina Faso. This will bring enormous benefit to the community to teach their healthcare practitioners a style of fast treatment for relief of pain and stiffness that requires no tools or special medical equipment, as the resources in that area are quite limited.
Money raised for this trip will cover my airfare and costs during the trip (so I do not bring a burden to the local people), as well as fundraising for the startup of a local treatment clinic by Dr. Abdel Traore. Donations could also come in the form of clinic equipment, with donated money helping to ship these items to Africa.
One of my FDM practitioner friends in Africa remarked how he can have any of 60 different languages or dialects come into the clinic on any given day, but the clinic staff can only get by in 15 languages. FDM allows them to bridge the verbal gap with their patients, which is especially helpful without the assistance of a "Call-a-Translator" phone line. This is because FDM emphasizes translating the patient's often subconscious hand gestures they use when describing pain, stiffness, numbness, tingling, etc. He also remarked that in his area of Africa, "We will not have the money for a beautiful surgical suite, an MRI machine, or a CT scanner. We have our eyes, our brains, and our hands." With FDM, that covers most of what they need.
For those that want to know more about FDM - it is a medically-based model of assessment and treatment originated by an American physician, Stephen Typaldos, DO. Dr. Typaldos recognized over time with clinical experience that patient used their hands to describe different symptoms. In all, he categorized six different sets of conditions, each with its own clinical presentation and hand gestures. The hand gestures could be: pointing to a sharp painful spot with one fingertip, drawing a line of burning pain with the fingertips, pushing into a deep achy spot in a muscle with multiple fingertips, and more. Each condition is matched with a set of hand signals, which allows the clinician to employ the best manual therapy technique for that condition with less time wasted to guesswork. It amazes me that with all the breakthroughs in medical and physical therapy research, no other person I know of has identified the relationship between hand gestures and different musculoskeletal conditions.
The amazement and excitement I have had by adding FDM into my clinical practice, as well as seeing the astonishment in physician's faces when seeing the sometimes hard to believe results themselves is what drives me to help spread FDM to other healthcare providers.
I hope you are motivated to help spread FDM to a needy area of Africa, and to help start a clinic in a remote town that has almost no resources for medical care.
Organizer
Matt Booth
Organizer
Boise, ID
