Shared Decision-Making: Putting the Patient Back in the Driver's Seat – With Walt Fritz
As our profession pushes toward patient-centered care, one thing is becoming clear — the old clinician-as-the-expert model isn’t serving our patients the way we think it is.
In this episode, Jamie sits down with Walt Fritz — a physical therapist with nearly 40 years of experience and someone who famously walked away from a prominent role in the myofascial release world to publicly question the narratives he’d built his career on.
They talk about shared decision-making, informed consent, power sharing in the therapeutic relationship, and why the “soft skills” might actually be the most important skills we have.
In this episode:
- Why the clinician-as-the-expert model is failing our patients
- How the language we use (like “releasing fascia”) affects informed consent
- What shared decision-making actually looks like in a treatment room
- The concept of *metatherapy* — and why how you apply a technique matters more than the technique itself
- How to give patients a range of treatment choices including home care, frequency, and movement
- Why the “micromanaging patient” is actually your greatest asset
- Carl Rogers’ 1957 paper and what psychotherapy figured out 70 years ago that manual therapy is still catching up to
- Why Walt calls these “human skills,” not soft skills
Whether you’re deep into manual therapy or just starting to question some of the narratives you were taught — this conversation is going to make you think differently about the person on your table.
Safety video Walt Referenced can be found by clicking HERE
References:
Helou, L. (2017). Crafting the dialogue: Meta-therapy in transgender voice and communication training. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 2(10), 83-91.
Cerritelli, F., Chiacchiaretta, P., Gambi, F., & Ferretti, A. (2017). Effect of continuous touch on brain functional connectivity is modified by the operator’s tactile attention. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11, 368.
Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of consulting psychology, 21(2), 95.
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