Scope of Professional Practice in Podiatry Care - Coursework Example

A review of diagnosis and patient assessment aims to critically reflect on significance within Podiatry care, as well as the ethical and professional issues surrounding the management of people living with foot morbidity. The assessment of the presence or absence of various signs and symptoms within Podiatry crosses into many other medical disciplines such as orthopedics, neurology, sports medicine, and rheumatology. Nevertheless, podiatry has a specific approach to diagnostics and data collection and is mostly more holistic than other fields of traditional health care (Barnett, et al., 2005), which is supported by Curran and Dananberg, (2005) also Thompson et al., 2005).
All signs occurring in foot diseases could be divided into two groups: subjective (complaints) and objective (visible or detectable by physical examination). The most common symptoms amongst patients with podiatric pathology are presented by pain, feelings of numbness, burning, tingling, and other manifestations (Curran, Dananberg, 2005). Caselli and George (2003) suggest patients can experience limitation of movement in the joints. Some diseases are characterized by inflammatory or atrophic changes of the skin, deformations of the foot. Thus the condition called “pes cavus“ has the deformity of the foot due to a fixed plantar flexion. Another example of the deformation is flat feet (Connors et al., 1998).
However podiatric disorders can have not only local manifestations but also seriously influence the common well-being of the patient. For example, pain can cause cardiovascular problems and depression (Abramson, 1985) and is supported by Udell, Weiss, (1998); whilst Bennett et al (2001) suggests the changes of locomotion may influence the psychological mode and could decrease quality of life (Bryan, et al., 1991), which is supported by Wrobel, (2000).
There are two approaches to the assessment of the symptoms. The first one is qualitative which determines the absence or presence of a symptom without its quantitative assessment. Nevertheless for differential diagnosis and practical issues of clinical management a quantitative assessment is also required (Redmond, et al 2002). For subjective signs Likert scales are useful, but many clinical signs could be described with more specific units of measurement. For example assessment of the peripheral blood circulation could be supported by the appropriate measurement of skin temperature or blood pressure (Redmond et al., 2002), and is supported by Boyko et al. (1997), and McLeod-Roberts, (1995).
The characteristics of pulse on the different arteries of the lower extremity for example; the femoral artery, popliteal artery, dorsal pedal artery, anterior tibial artery, and dorsal artery as well as indirect signs or instrumental methods such as dopplerography could be helpful in the determination of the clinical grade of the peripheral artery insufficiency (McLeod-Roberts, 1995).