What is physical and rehabilitation medicine?

What is physical and rehabilitation medicine? What is a physiatrist How can a physiatrist help cancer patients?

Full name of the specialty is PM&R, So physical medicine and rehabilitation, it's a mouthful.

The kind of between doctors, the fancy word is physiatrist or physiatrist. It's debatable because people don't want to be confused with psychiatry.

And so in my field, I focus on the musculoskeletal neurological issues and how they affect function and have kind of a broad view of all the other medical oncologic things that are going on from a physical function lens. And so you know that those are a little bit fancy words for like muscle bones, joints, nerves, brain, spinal cord.

So that's my area of expertise from a non-surgical standpoint.

And looking at the rehabilitation therapies like physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, medications, injections, bracing, equipment, social factors, their home environment, and trying to figure out what the best way to address their physical function is.

I affect their work. Chemotherapy affects my work. It kind of goes both ways. And so say someone already has a neuropathy, some nerve issue, numbness, tingling. Well, they're at higher risk of developing further neuropathy depending on the chemotherapy regimen. There are certain medications, chemotherapies like taxane, paclitaxel or Velcade, or for myeloma or like the platinum based chemotherapies with high risks of peripheral neuropathy.

And so we want to get ahead of the game. Exercising is important. And there's also different types of therapies to address neuropathy. Ideally before it starts. But once it starts, if there's chemotherapy induced neuropathy, then we want to address the balance issues and

help people function better with what they have, help them recover as much as possible.

they still have the same body everyone else has with or without cancer, they can still get other muscle bone, joint issues, other types of neuropathies on top of that. And so distinguishing and diagnosing and managing those issues that pop up kind of because of the cancer, because of the cancer treatment or unrelated and completely unrelated, that that affects their ability to function.

That's what I like to focus on.

So there's very few people who practice in my field. Maybe 40 something, 50 something, who are fellowship trained in cancer rehabilitation. And it's a rapidly growing field. And for me, specifically, the patient would have to ask their oncology doctor to send a referral to me because there's only one of me.

But to find any physical medicine and rehab, doctor there are directories out there, the professional society that the major, our major professional society is called AAPM&R. So you can search for a directory there and learn about all the different conditions, the different subspecialties, that everyone has some general training.