Current Practices, Protocols, and Rationales of Diathermy Use by Occupational Therapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the patterns of use of diathermy by occupational therapists in skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and its purported effectiveness. A survey was completed by 90 occupational therapists (response rate of 36%) who were members of the American Occupational Therapy Association, were listed in the practice area of SNF/long-term care (LTC) facility, and who had experience working in a SNF. Results showed that 54% of the participants had experience using diathermy in SNFs nationwide. The majority of participants with diathermy experience (94%) indicated that they typically implemented diathermy as a preparatory treatment before a functional activity and most participants (80%) administered diathermy for 16 to 30 minutes. The most common objectives when using diathermy were reducing pain (96%) and increasing range of motion (83%). The findings indicated that diathermy was being used for a wide range of diagnoses and symptoms, and that there were discrepancies in how and why occupational therapists administered diathermy in a SNF setting. Although occupational therapists with diathermy experience most frequently (48%) reported “usually” (i.e., 61-80% of the time) seeing a positive effect, many did not know the technicalities of administering diathermy, including the frequency (MHz) used (44%) and how the modality was reimbursed (11%). Additionally, there were conflicting results in diathermy being used for diagnoses and/or symptoms for which it is contraindicated. Due to a lack of research on diathermy use within occupational therapy literature, experimental studies to determine the effectiveness of diathermy would greatly benefit the field of occupational therapy in its effort to be an evidence-based practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.138 | 0.226 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".