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| Physician Information |
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Basic Physician Information… Must Read When you need quality orthopedic medical massage, and professional, consistent therapy that gets results for your patients who are recovering from soft tissue injuries, we can help. We will insist that your patients keep all of their appointments with you. They can come see us only if they are current with your plan of care. Following your recommendations is essential to your patient's recovery, and we will provide care ethically and encourage your patients remain compliant with your directions. We only work on those areas covered by your prescription and will not stray from them regardless of a patient's request. We know that there are reasons why you diagnose what you diagnose, and reasons why you might omit other areas. When you send your patients to the Wellness Center for a Medical Massage, they will receive focused outcome-based soft tissue techniques that are designed to increase range of motion and decrease pain to diagnosed areas. Types of Patients You Should Send for a Medical Massage Typically, prescriptions are written for patients who are recovering from soft tissue injuries. We commonly see patients recovering from automobile accidents, surgeries, and sports injuries, to name just a few. We also see patients with scoliosis, adaptive myofascial shortening injuries, carpel tunnel syndrome, joint replacement, back pain, stroke victims, cancer patients, etc. Meeting Your Expectations for Quality Care During their first session, your patient's situation will be assessed. We will evaluate your patient's condition through a series of range of motion tests (in which we are looking for passive, active, and resisted range of motion issues). We will check for contraindications to medical massage, evaluate the patient's phase of healing, complete a postural and palpatory evaluation, and formulate a plan of care based on your diagnoses paired with the findings from the evaluation. Immediately after the initial session, we will consult with you if we find contraindications and discuss the appropriate changes. You will also be sent frequent updates and ultimately oversee the entire care plan. Following the evaluation, if we find no contraindications the patient will receive treatment. Depending on your patient's phase of healing and your prescription, this may consist of regular massage (meaning effleurage, petrissage and tapotement only), the application of heat/cold or topical pain relief preparations, trigger point therapy, assisted stretching without active resistance, proprioceptive neuromuscular re-education (PNF stretches), muscle-energy techniques (MET), myofascial release, or other manual therapies. Here is what not to expect: In most massage therapy instruction programs, there is training in offering stretches and exercises for the client to do at home, and to advise the client to drink plenty of water following their massage treatment. This is sound advice in most cases, but the medical massage model is quite different. And, although we have been trained in stretches and therapeutic exercises, we will not offer any post-treatment suggestions unless specifically instructed by you, in writing, for each individual case. We will also not treat any area that does not have a soft tissue diagnosis code provided by you. Should Medical Massage be Combined with Physical Therapy? Only you can answer that question. Physical Therapy (PT) often focuses on increasing strength, but a large body of evidence and scientific studies show that it is not necessarily efficient to strengthen before lengthening. This is why some physicians find that prescribing PT and Medical Massage together generates the fastest improvement for their patients. Why Should Physicians Send Patients to the Wellness Center? Sending patients to the Wellness Center for a Medical Massage should be a good experience for everyone. We seek to have good working relationships with partnering physicians, and to communicate regularly about each patient. We also understand that your time is limited and valuable. Therefore we know that if you send us your patients, you are trusting us with someone very important and we make a point of never stepping outside the bounds of your prescription. If you refer a patient for cervical sprain/strain, your patient will be treated for cervical sprain/strain, and nothing else. If we find that adjacent areas may have related pathologies, we will inform you of our findings, and ask if you feel that those areas are also ready to be worked. But unless we have a specific soft tissue diagnosis code from you, we will not treat an area. We are also very much interested in continuing education, expanding our toolboxes, and learning all we can about soft tissue therapies. It is important to us to provide the most intelligent, educated therapy possible to help your patients recover fully and quickly. No matter what the standard for medical massage therapy becomes, know that we will not stop there. When you are passionate about something, it drives you. We love what we do, and we hope it shows. Can Medical Massage Affect Compliance? In some cases it can happen, but please understand that it is not our intent for this to happen. Sometimes a patient will discontinue treatment because he or she feels that there is no more improvement to be had, or they don't want to rely on pharmaceutical therapy for a protracted period of time, or they do not see the long-term benefits in your plan of care for them. Whatever the reasoning, sending those patients for medical massage can be necessary means of getting them on the road to recovery. More importantly it can help convince them to continue with the remainder of your recommended treatment. Code of Ethics Followed In Their Entirety We believe in, and follow a strict code of ethics from Medical Massage training. Length of treatment is determined by the areas diagnosed by you for treatment. On each date of service, a maximum of two physical medicine Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) procedures (15 minutes each) per body area, with a maximum of four total CPT codes per date of service, may be billed to insurance. The three body areas that are considered industry standard for physical medicine billing are the axial skeleton, torso, upper and lower extremities. Four total CPT codes would require that a minimum of two or more body areas are diagnosed to be treated. If three body areas are diagnosed for treatment, the maximum CPT usage is still limited to four. If we are given four diagnosis codes, but all of them are in the axial skeleton, the patient is still allowed only two CPT codes per date of service. This is also why it is inadvisable for the patient to see us and the physical therapist on the same day. Note: If we achieve Maximum Medical Improvement (MMI) for that day of service before the allotted time allowed by the Medical Massage standards, we will go with the lesser time instead. |