The Cook vs. The Chef

The cookbook approach to physical therapy is rampant, and often cited as a systematic way of treating patients effectively. Every patient with a diagnosis is run through a machine, where their symptoms are plugged in to an algorithm and the output is a treatment strategy. This can work if you are a health care provider that behaves more like a cook, a valuable part of the team that requires a recipe which does not change, regardless of a patron’s taste.

Recipes are incredibly useful and sometimes necessary to ensure a standardized product that gets the desired result. It eliminates the need for thought and allows for a tremendous amount of efficiency. Cooks are a vital part of the team. They can read a recipe, they know where to find the sugar and the measuring cups. They deliver the agreed upon meal without diverging from the instructions.

A chef is a different component of the team. The chef tinkers with recipes to improve upon them. A chef adapts on the fly and creates new things that had not been previously considered. Chefs create and make something no one had thought of previously. In the medical world, these are the providers that look at each patient as an individual. Each patient provides a unique scenario that allows for creative solutions to their ailments.

A cook is a requirement in the kitchen, that is the medical field. We need people to follow instructions and to avoid deviations from the status quo. However, issues evolve when there is no chef to develop new recipes. Creative solutions are required when new problems arise, and without that art in medicine, there are no answers when old systems begin to fail.

Austin Ulrich, Physical Therapist