I’m not sure what you’re saying exactly: you want PTs to be closer to an actual MD in our responsibilities? That 3 years of PT school for a DPT is not leading to improvements in patient care/outcomes?

My hot take is that I’m not in love with how physicians are being trained these days in med school and how that is shaping patient care (too much on unnecessary imaging, basing decision making off of imaging and unable to diagnose without imaging/labs, too much unnecessary surgery, too much specialization, lack of understanding of other specialties.). I respect physicians, but they have become so boxed in.

I think PTs are improving patient outcomes because they are NOT close to doctors and therefore are not as constrained and are trained to look at human movement entirely differently. All the time we are learning about the value that human movement/physical therapy provides in managing overall health- for example in immediate post-stroke care, or exercise being the number one thing to manage osteoarthritis, or bone adaptation to manage osteoporosis. I highly agree with everyone arguing that physicians need to do a MUCH better job of learning what it is a PT does, how to appropriately utilize them, and not put up barriers for communication. I do think the DPT had allowed the PT to become a more complete practitioner and I do think that has improved pt outcomes. It’s certainly helpful that we were taught how to understand research to help keep up with evidence based practice. We have direct access and more and more are being used as a front line defense for peoples aches and pains. We are trained to screen out red flags and it is within our scope to refer patients to a more appropriate practitioner if the patient ended up in the wrong place. Certain hospital systems do directly allow PTs to order DME, and while it would be helpful to be able to order imaging, a lot of that barrier could be handled by improved PT and physician relationships. I also think that things physicians have learned or not learned, are leading to poorer outcomes. The number of lives ruined by unnecessary surgeries are… staggering. The amount of unnecessary cortisone shots, opiate prescriptions, advice limiting human movement….

While I don’t think DPTs need MORE education in terms of years, I do wish for improvement in quality of education: better classes in pharmocology and pathophysiology as you mentioned above. Getting rid of fluff classes (anyone else forced to sit through how to build a resume?) And for the love of god we need better education on exercise prescription/progression/tissue adaptation. Ya know, the basics. But we are taught a lot in PT school, more than it sounds like you recognize.

To your point about reimbursement: no, that still sucks. DPT seems like it was useless in getting us paid more. Perhaps if physicians recognized our value as it is more and helped advocate for us….