Large Patients

While on my musculoskeletal placement I was recently treating a very lage patient with lower back pain. As I am quite small I found some components of the objective assessment quite difficult particularly flexion and extension PPIVM’s. This made me think about what the appropriate thing to do was, should I still attempt to assess these PPIVM’s and risk injuring myself or was it appropriate to skip this part of the assessment to save my back. I thought I would rather not risk injuring my back to perform a full objective assessment on this patient and it would be better to simply modify my assessment. When I did this I was still able to find objective asterix signs and come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Later I spoke to my supervisor about it and she said it was appropriate to not perform some parts of the assessment if it was likely to risk my back and usually in these situations it is possible to modify the treatment and still receive the same results. In the future if I have a very large patient I will modify my treatment to protect my back rather than trying to perform all parts of the assessment and risk injuring myself.