Maggiemaybe
I feel I really must defend your physio.
My daughter is an NHS physio who usually works in Chronic Pain Management along with health professionals from various other disciplines. They hold several clinics a week in different areas of her Health Authority. These are attended by up to 20 patients and, if appropriate, their carers or partners. Because of Covid, these clinics can no longer take place and she is working alone from an office in her local hospital, dealing with patients with many different problems, not just chronic pain.
Face to face consultations have been scrapped and during the first lockdown she and all her fellow physios were told to discharge as many patients as possible on the understanding that when things were back to normal, their treatment would be reviewed.
Since about last May/June she has been doing telephone consultations. Many of the patients are pleased to have the chance to actually talk to a health professional. Indeed, some of the patients are just glad to speak to another human, and tell her all sorts of things not related to their clinical needs! The majority of these patients are not known to her.
When she is able to see her patients face to face, she remembers them from week to week and also remembers the little things they tell her. (It might be incidental things like their dogs, their children, their parents or whether they are no longer able to do their knitting or sewing because of their pain.) When she consults with people she hasn’t previously met, on the telephone, she tries to build a mental image of them and remember the little things they have previously told her. Sometimes she gets it wrong!
I’m sure your physio wasn’t being patronising to you. Perhaps she got you mixed up with another patient with a similar name or similar symptoms. Please remember, the physio could be chatting to 8 different patients a day, 5 days a week, so mistakes will happen. They are only human and as my daughter told me, when she qualified as a physio, the last thing she expected was to spend every working day sitting in an office on her own and trying to give patients advice over the telephone.
I hope your shoulder is getting better. Keep doing your exercises if appropriate.