SFTR and SCS

Firstly, as you can tell by the title there is a lot of alphabet soup in the health care community...

Secondly, here are two interesting things I read about today...

Range of motion (ROM), which is how many degrees of motion a joint in the body allows in a particular direction, is normally given in regards to one movement at a time (i.e. the shoulder starts at 0 degrees and can flex aka move forward to 180 degrees [normally], this would be documented as R shldr flex 0-180).
An alternative method of documenting, which according to the Norkin text is not used very often in the United States, is the Sagittal-Frontal-Transverse-Rotation (SFTR) recording method. These 4 words describe the different planes of motion (note that coronal is another name for the frontal plane and rotation involves multiple planes). So in the sagittal plane, which is pretty much forward and backward, shoulder movement would normally be 60 degrees of extension, neutral would be 0 degrees, and flexion as stated previously would be 180... this would be documented S: 60-0-180 degrees).
As another note on ROM "normal" is very variable and usually the most important "normal" is to compare the amount of motion to the other side of the body (the "normal"/healthier side). As an example, shoulder flexion has been found to be "normal" anywhere from 150-180 degrees which is a fairly large discrepancy).Moving along... on Monday I start my 2nd clinic and my clinical instructor has recently had a case study published in JMMT. The focus of the case study was a patient with complex regional pain syndrome I (CRPS I - previously knowns as RSD) that was treated mainly with Strain Counterstrain (SCS). This technique in my brief understanding consists of locating tender points and placing the patient in positions of comfort (POC's) for a period of time (usually 90 seconds) to help "release hypothesized fascial restrictions" or "shorten the muscle tissue containing the involved hyperactive muscle spindle" (refer to this article - .pdf).

Off to rest before the 9 weeks of clinical learning... lookin forward to it...
hope you are all doing great out there and thanks for reading :-D