By Dr. Sean M. Wells, PT, DPT, OCS, ATC/L, CSCS, CNPT, Cert-DN

Recently our team received emails and messages from a few New York physical therapists. Their overall message was clear: you and your courses are wrong and that carnivore is the only way (along with other expletives). As a proud evidenced-based provider of nutritional continuing education, accept this as our reply and an outlining of why the carnivore diet is ridiculous and unsafe.

Origins

If you are not familiar with the carnivore diet let us explain it briefly, as there is much misinformation and pseudoscience surrounding it. The diet was originally developed by a German scientist in the 1800s. Derivations of this diet followed, such as the meat and hot water diet, with intentions of “curing” diseases like diabetes and chronic diarrhea. While well-intentioned, such diets never gained much traction until recently when an orthopedic surgeon named Shawn Baker decided to make it part of his brand. He wrote a...

Insurance physical therapy at your hospital or local clinic is steeped in tradition: find the one problem, focus on it, and fix it. The services are reimbursed based on a fee-for-service model. The more care the more payment that is given, regardless of outcomes or future setbacks. Physical therapist (PT) education skews also towards the model of problem-based learning, exam, and intervention. Lost in the mix of the insurance and educational maelstrom is the patient: what other issues are lurking, how do they address the "whole" patient and not just the one body part or pain, and how can they continue living healthy and happy?

Fortunately a new model of PT practice emerged. The Health-Focused Therapy Model (HFPTM) promotes PTs to recommend notions like smoking cessation, regular physical activity, and even nutrition, when/where appropriate. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham produced the new model which hopes to only enhance what PTs currently offer.

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