Use of Electrophysical Agents: Findings and Implications of a Survey of Practice in Metro Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purposes: (1) To determine the availability, use and factors associated with the use of electrophysical agents (EPAs) in the management of patients with musculoskeletal impairments in physical therapy (PT) outpatient clinics in Metro Toronto and (2) to determine sources of EPA information used by physical therapists (PTs) and their perceived need for continuing EPA education. Method: Information was collected by a questionnaire distributed to all eligible PTs in the defined area. Data included the characteristics of PTs and clinics, availability and use of EPAs by PTs, treatments received by patients, sources and influence of EPA information, use of support personnel and PTs' past education and future needs. Results: The response rate was 54.1 per cent. The results were analyzed for 125 eligible PTs. On a typical day, treatment excluded EPAs for 29 per cent of patients. Treatment included one, two and three or more EPAs for 36, 26, and 9 per cent of patients, respectively. On average, PTs used EPAs for more than half of their patients: the most significant factors associated with EPA use were type of patient funding and number of patients treated per hour. Place of entry-level education and years since graduation were associated with the sources and perceived importance of EPA information that PTs used. More than half of the respondents indicated an interest in continuing EPA education. Conclusions: EPAs are commonly included in PT management of persons with musculoskeletal impairments. Entry-level and continuing education should promote use of EPAs based on scientific evidence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".