The patient that I failed to treat

With each passing day, I became more and more confident in my skills as a physiotherapist and I was always happy when my patient was progressing well. Then one day, as is inevitable in the life of a healthcare professional, I came up against a wall: I was faced with a patient, let's call him Pierre, who did everything I told him, who believed in me very strongly, but I couldn't really heal him. I was faced with a condition that I had already treated and that I therefore believed I could treat. At every encounter, I tried different ways to deal with it, but I was unable to achieve the desired result. "I tried", as in "trial and error", because yes, that's what medicine is all about.

And my response to that was to question myself first. What if I'm not good enough? What if I didn't know enough? What if in order to be a good physiotherapist I had to jump on every possible training course to be really up to the challenge? In addition to the exact nature of the questions I was asking myself, the questioning process opened the door to something very important: my raison d'être as a physiotherapist. This kind of questioning is sometimes difficult to start or to complete because it puts out of balance the reassuring foundations that have been built within us.

There are other questions that have emerged: Can I really cure everyone? If I can't, then how can I become a better physiotherapist? These questions gradually led me to a realization that made me a much better healthcare professional. It was then that I not only realized, but more importantly, accepted that I had professional limitations. And that these professional limits were not the end of something or an invisible barrier that would restrict my practice, but on the contrary, would open unexpected doors. These doors would actually open the door to other professionals.

Let's go back to Pierre, my patient who was giving me a hard time. After I was so upset, I gathered my courage and told him that I had reached my limits, that I could no longer help him and that I had to refer him to another professional. To my astonishment, Pierre was even more grateful for such transparency and humility. He had trusted me from the beginning and to tell him my limits was confirmation that he was right to have done so.

Recognizing my professional limits required a great deal of humility, the same humility that Mathieu spoke of in his last article. I had to admit to myself that it was impossible for me to release all my patients from pain. I had to admit to myself that my profession, physiotherapy, was not the solution to all ailments. That other professionals had other approaches and that these differences added to the richness of our healthcare system. I realized that medicine was not an exact science and that sometimes, even when we tried our best, the results would not always be what we expected. At the end of the day, however, recognizing my limitations made me a better physiotherapist because it forced me to open myself up to other professionals and by working together, we would be stronger for our patients.