[video_player type=”embed” width=”560″ height=”315″ align=”center” margin_top=”20″ margin_bottom=”20″]
[/video_player]
Most people have probably heard about Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game, the best selling book by Michael Lewis and later the movie staring Brad Pitt which was a hit in 2011.
Billy Beane a manager of the Oakland A’s created a system for evaluating talent that turned conventional wisdom on its head.
Talent scouts and really the game of baseball scoffed at his efforts. Using little know systematic methods of evaluating talent, he was able to find baseball gold in players that most organizations overlooked or undervalued.
Beane paid attention to numbers collected over the years by a group of baseball enthusiasts, including software engineers, physics professors and Wall Street analysts, numbers that most everyone else in baseball ignored. Let’s just call them outsiders. With new insights into the game of baseball, Beane was able to field competitive teams at a fraction of the price that the best teams in baseball were paying.
The moral of the story is that oft times, “insiders” are so close to their subject that they develop a type of blindness that prevents them from seeing fresh insights that are often obvious to those outside the system.
What happens when you take and apply the outsiders Moneyball approach to the knee replacement recovery timeline?
You get fresh insights and a breakthrough recovery method that blows the doors off conventional rehab.
Hi Michelle Stiles, physical therapist. I’ve spent a decade swiping insights and best practices from the disciplines of weight loss, fitness, and addiction recovery-all outsiders to the physical therapy world- and applying them to knee replacement recovery? And what did I uncover?
Initial Discoveries:
First off I discovered that increasing the frequency of the exercises program helped tremendously. Secondly, I ruthlessly tracked the numbers and taught my patients the tracking system as well. After the numbers were crunched, only the “meat and tater” exercises were left standing. This resulted in a more limited exercise program which made my patients more effective than ever before.
The third unconventional application was to change the locus of empowerment from the therapist to the patient. The patient was now the central person responsible for his or her recovery. The shift was dramatic and the results were too. The forth tactic was the creation of two recovery-specific tools in which patients leverage their own success and manage their gains even when the physical therapist is not around.
The Results
This system is a range of motion-getting machine that works on men or women, young or old, regardless of personality. After tracking hundreds of patients, I can confidently assert that patients can achieve 2-3 degrees range of motion per day. While this may seem like a small daily number it results in a whopping 14-21 degrees per week, enough progress to get most people to 120-125 by the 2 week mark and off pain medication provided they have no other complications.
Prediction of range gains is virtually unheard of in the physical therapy world, but totally achievable.
Moneyball and Knee Replacement Recovery…. Now they have got a lot in common.
Watch the Video Series on Speeding Up Your Recovery After A Knee Replacement
