a new perspective.

Not trying to break my usual tradition of exploring a new city with a run, Lisa, Kaitlyn, and I woke up at 6 am to see what Melbourne has to offer. It was a little difficult to truly take everything in because the sun had yet to rise. However, it was still fun. Since our hostel is in North Melbourne, we ran south towards the heart of Melbourne and through the Royal Botanic Gardens, then back. On the way back, we decided to go a different route and ended up getting lost. Even with the map we had brought, we couldn’t quite figure out how to get back so we stopped for directions at a café and they were able to direct us back to the hostel.

After a quick breakfast, we were off to the University of Melbourne for a tour of their sports facility and then a shadowing day. As ecstatic as I was for the shadowing day, I was even more ecstatic to finally wear my khakis and polo! (Just kidding. About the khakis and polo.) The tour through the University of Melbourne was very interesting! Our guide was the director of sports at the University of Melbourne, named Rod. He explained to us that it was the hardest university in Australia to get accepted into. It was established in 1853, and they were currently undergoing a lot of reconstruction to their buildings. Other than a few of their ‘heritage’ buildings that legally could not be changed, Rod explained that there were plans to update almost all of their buildings to make the campus appear nicer (which I don’t necessarily blame—some of the older buildings didn’t look really well maintained). I also found their educational model to be really interesting. The Melbourne Model was created in 2008 and it was slightly controversial at first for such a high profile university to completely switch their curriculum. The idea behind the Melbourne Model was to receive a general education in a field of study for your undergraduate degree and then specialize in graduate school. Because of this, the only fields you can receive your major in are: agriculture, arts, biomedicine, commerce, environments, fine arts, music, oral health, and science.

When we finished the tour, we had lunch and then it was time for shadowing. Since there are 13 athletic training students in our program, they split us up into different shadowing days and my group went today. We had the great opportunity to shadow Kusal Goonewardena, a sports physiotherapist who has a very impressive 15-year career. He has treated over 15,000 athletes, opened the most successful chain of physiotherapy clinics in Australia, and has opened another private clinic within the University of Melbourne called elite aKademy. It is opened to all elite athletes at the U of M at no cost to them due to their scholarship, partial scholarship athletes had their membership fee waived, but still had to pay for treatment, and then the clinic was also open to the public at their cost. Kusal also developed a better payment method for his patients in order to increase success of treatment—instead of paying per appointment, they paid for a certain time span depending on what they are receiving treatment for (ex. 4 weeks, 8 weeks, or 12 weeks, etc.)

I was extremely impressed by the way that Kusal practiced—definitely the best lecture I have experienced so far. He is one of 60 physios that follows the Ridgeway Method in Australia and is one of three who has won an award for excellence in practice when it comes to that method. Kusal truly focused on the comfort of the patient and made clear the patients’ goals for each of their sessions. The best way I can put it is that he really emphasized the ‘happiness factor’. For example, when we asked him how he felt about kinesio tape (after seeing him apply the McConnell taping method on a track runner) he said that while evidence based practice was important, if something works and the athlete is content with the results, then continue to use it. During our shadowing experience we got to see one of his appointments and then since the other appointment cancelled, he showed us how he performs the initial evaluation on his new patients. His first appointment was a long distance track runner who had come in with hamstring problems and through his initial evaluation he had been able to pinpoint the primary cause for her tight hamstrings—hypomobility in her thoracic spine. Upon entering his clinic, all you see are tables—there are no ultrasound machines or electrical stimulation machines, which is a major difference from ones in the US. This was not due to lack of funds however, it was simply the way he chose to practice and it made sense once I saw him in action. Through various muscle energy exercises, he was able to increase mobility and show us how she has improved since she started visiting him.

To simulate his initial patient evaluation since his second appointment had cancelled, he used Lexi as the patient since she has felt hypomobility in her PSIS joint since surfing in Lennox Head. Before even evaluating her hip, he pinpointed what movements bothered her most and then evaluated her thoracic spine, lumbar spine, gluteus muscles, and supraspinatus to see how they were related because he has found that those are the four main problem areas for most people. His evaluation found that Lexi while she had tightness and hypomobility in multiple areas, the one that was related to her PSIS ‘feeling stuck’ was hypomobility in her thoracic spine. After doing a couple of muscle energy exercises, we went through the evaluation again to see how those few exercises improved her movement, gait, and the way she walked up and down the stairs. Seeing Kusar work was an amazing experience and I will definitely be looking into his past and future published work more.
After an amazing shadowing experience, we returned to the hostel to relax for a little bit before exploring Melbourne for dinner. A group of us walked downtown and spotted a restaurant called Equinox, which had a promising menu with reasonable prices and a happy hour that ended at 9. Needless to say, we stayed there most of the night, ate good food, and were able to be as loud as we wanted since no one else in Melbourne was out on a Monday night.