Teaching Interns

Posted On: June 6, 2014

I am Dr. David A. Johnson and I am licensed as both a chiropractic physician and as a physical therapist in Illinois. I am the owner and Director of Clinics at North Shore Spinal & Sports Rehabilitation located in Highland Park and Lake Bluff.

As the Director of these clinics I have had the opportunity to train a number of student interns in various professions over the years. I have had medical doctors in training, chiropractic physicians, student physical therapists and student physical therapy assistants all rotate through the clinics.

Each one of these clinicians has brought an enthusiasm to the clinic that typically makes them a joy to work with. There are challenges of course, each student has a different skill set and this must be assessed so as to help them learn the additional skills they will need to become good clinicians. This is done through interviewing them and then having them work on myself and other practitioners in our clinic to evaluate what their strengths and weaknesses are.

The practitioners at our clinics then take it upon themselves to teach and train our unique way of treating our patients. At North Shore Spinal & Sports Rehabilitation we combine the best manual therapies with evidence based rehabilitative exercise programs to help our patients achieve their goals. When I first opened the practice years ago, I recognized that the chiropractic manipulation though a powerful tool only went so far to help may patients get back into action. So I started exploring building rehabilitative exercise programs. Over the years this has developed into a wonderful approach that has helped thousands of patients.

As the practice grew I needed to teach others to help in the rehabilitation of the musculoskeletal system in our patients. Every complaint from the common lower back pain compliant to the more complex post surgical cases had to be properly assessed, have a treatment plan developed and executed.  To this end I have spent countless hours training the staff as well as all of the student interns at our clinics. This effort has been now memorialized in a manual that I wrote, with the help of my students a couple of years ago. The manual is a treasure trove of how to help patients with common orthopedic complaints and is given to each intern to study and keep for their future reference.

Some have suggested that spending so much time teaching and sharing our proprietary ways of doing things is foolish. To them I say knowledge is the birth right of every human being and by sharing it I have enriched the lives of countless people, which in the end is priceless.