Calling All Healthcare Providers!
Find out how 5 min of your time can help suffering patients.
As a passionate advocate for posture, airway, posture and breathing health, I want to do everything I can to better integrate awareness of treatments with other medical professionals care of our patient community. That’s why I’m helping Brad Gilden, PT, create an Airway Specialty Group with APTA (American Physical Therapy Association).
This process may take up to 5 years, so we can’t delay any longer while patients are suffering and need our help.
Read on as Brad reviews our mission and what you can do to help.
The Problem
We are all aware there is a growing epidemic of humans that are faced with airway obstruction. This obstruction leads to sleep disturbances caused by snoring, upper airway resistance to severe obstructive sleep apnea. All these conditions can cause fragmented sleep, increased stress on the cardiovascular system, parafunction, TMJD, psychological impacts and so much more.
More research is being published highlighting the underdevelopment of the nasopharyngeal region leading to airway constriction. This increased resistance to airflow promotes additional nasal congestion leading to open mouth breathing, down and backward development of the mid and lower face further promoting poor breathing mechanics. The cause appears to be related to epigenetic factors such as: eating processed soft foods, environmental allergens, poor postures from use of technology, etc.
How is this being addressed?
Below is a very shortened summary list of the different professionals we work with:
The pulmonologists/ENTs/Sleep medicine doctors are offering patients CPAP, blowing positive air pressure into the patient at night. This doesn’t fix the issue and most of the time the patients are not compliant. They may offer a surgical procedure to stimulate the hypoglossal nerve, which also helps only a limited number of patients.
- The dentists currently offer MAD’s (mandibular advancement devices to help hold the jaw forward keeping tongue out of the airway by holding the mandible forward, or other splints to improve the bite and open the airway.
- The orthodontists may offer some type of palatal expansion to help open the airway and improve arch development.
- The oral surgeons offer MMA (mandibular maxillary surgery to open the airway.
We are PTs what can we do?
We can do so much to help support all the other professionals above. We serve an indispensable role as part of the multi-disciplinary team. We are already doing it every day by improving our patient’s posture, breathing strategies, helping to manage the autonomic nervous system balance through manual therapy and therapeutic exercises. We are also experts in managing issues related to the stomatognathic system, tongue mobility, TMJ function, managing behavioral changes such as bed positioning, ergonomics, all which are improving overall health of the musculoskeletal system and promoting improved airways.
The Issue:
Like many other professions, physical therapists tend to be siloed. Often, we are specialists in in one area. I know PTs that are amazing working on the TMJ but have not considered the airway as a potential cause for TMD issues. We have therapists working on improving breathing that don’t have good understanding of the function and treatment of TMJ and the relationship of the cranium, mandible, and cervical spine. All of us need to learn how to work better with dentists and other medical professionals involved in this area. We also need to learn from one another.
The Solution:
We need to combine our knowledge, education, and relationships to build a united front. We need to make this education available to therapists throughout the country interested in learning and helping their patients. Eventually this will get into graduate school programs allowing PTs to be leaders in treating patients with craniofacial and airway related issues and teaming up with medical professionals throughout our communities.
Action: We Need Your Help
To make this a reality, we need to have support from the APTA. Our goal is to create a specialty group under the APTA. Our area of specialty is not represented by any of the existing groups.
The first step in applying for a specialty group is to have 100 signed petition letters from licensed PTs. We have 85 already, only 15 to go! Can you please send the petition letter to jhobson@hobsoninstitute.com by October 15th as I will be meeting with the committee to discuss our next moves for the new combined section that we’re trying to create.
