Physical Therapy vs. Therapist Assistants

I recently had a discussion with a PTA about this particular topic: why do some sources refer to the position as a "physical therapy assistant" vs. a "physical therapist assistant"? My general understanding is that the latter is the preferred and accurate term, especially since the APTA says so :) but also because in speaking with a number of PTA's the "therapist" title was preferred and more accurate in nature.

This led me of course to google (the ultimate research tool - don't tell that to my EBP professor's). I typed in "physical" and "assistant" to see what came up more. While the first result was for "therapy" the other 6 of the top 7 displayed were for "therapist". I visited the one site that was for a "therapy" assistant and ended up sending them the following message to the "contact us" section of their website:

I recently came across your page about the "Physical Therapy Assistant".

I would just like to point out that according to the American Physical Therapist Association (APTA) and numerous "PTA" programs and PTA's that I have spoken with, the correct phrase for their position is the "Physical Therapist Assistant". The emphasis of course on changing the "therapy" to "therapist".
Please take this change into consideration as it is more reflective of the true nature of the position and more accurate with industry standards.
Thank you.

Keep in mind that this is from allalliedhealthschools.com and I would imagine is a fairly popular website as it was the first result in my google search (this could just mean google found it to match my search phrase - not 100% up on google search results). For further informal research, I googled the terms "physical therapy assistant" and "physical therapist assistant" with the following number of results:

"...therapy..." - 889,000
"...therapist..." - 1,260,000

So this was fairly close. Looking through some of the results, the "therapy" group had some results due to some kind of error because (for instance) I searched through the APTA linked result for "therapy" thinking this was interesting but there was no mention of "physical therapy assistant" on the page just a mixture of those three words, which I thought was not supposed to pop up on google if you put the phrase in quotation marks... Also, I discovered that if you hit the "search" button more than once, you actually get a very different number of results. From my random number of clicks, it fluctuates between only two numbers, but I am not sure why or even how this can happen with such a wide range.

At the same time, I feel like two or three insignificant letters shouldn't be a big deal... but alas they can be very significant and when taken to meaning can mean very different things. In the end I support the APTA's stance and believe in consistency throughout the medical field to help alleviate some confusion and to avoid upsetting people such as the wonderful PTA's in this case who may be offended by a false characterization.

That was that, this is now... sleep...