Muscle Testing

توضیحات

Muscle Testing is presented as a scholarly book, one shorn of literary scaffolding and designed to be quickly understood by the new learner or used for review by the experienced clinician. Chapter 9, a brief synopsis of human muscle anatomy, will serve to remind the reader of relevant details of location, structure, innervation, and function. The tests included in this book are tried and true, back to the time of Wilhelmine Wright, circa 1907-1928, who first developed analysis of muscle function during the 1914 polio epidemic in New England.

Despite the long history of manual muscle testing, the techniques are not such that skill is achieved quickly, regardless of the considerable detail used to describe them. The only way to acquire mastery of clinical evaluation procedures, including manual muscle testing, is to practice over and over again. As experience with patients matures over time, the nuances that can never be fully described for the wide variety of patients encountered by the clinician will become as much intuition as science.

The master clinician will include muscle testing as part and parcel of every patient evaluation, no matter whether a formal detailed document is completed, or whether the test is used as a prelude to treatment planning. Muscle testing continues to be among the most fundamental skills of the physical therapist and others who concern themselves with abnormalities of human motion.