Name: Christian Vertudes

Position: PT, DPT, COMT, TPI Certified 

Physical Therapist

Doctor of Physical Therapy

Certified Orthopaedic Manual Therapist

Titleist Performance Institute Certified

Currently Working at: Nova Orthopedic and Spine Care

Education: Christina obtained his Bachelors in Physical Therapy in the Philippines and continued to finish a Doctorate program at Shenandoah university for Physical Therapy. 

Inspiration: Most of his family is in the healthcare field, most of his older cousins were nurses, and his uncle was a physician. PT was picking up traction around this time and he wanted to be different, didn’t want to be redundant. He had no real reason for joining PT.

Path to current job: Christian began working as a new grad in a hospital in Washington, D.C. and resided there for around 4-5 years. He did rotations between floors, got expeincerence with nurses as well, but Outpatient PT was his goal. He worked as a PT with Lake Ridge PTin Woodbridge,VA. He then switched to Nova orthopedic for six years. Christian then continued to move to Montclair PT and has now returned back to NOVA this past month.

Basic roles and responsibilities: 

Christian gave two different scenarios from his perspective of working in both a hospital setting and an OutPatient Care center. In a hospital, the patients would be very involved and once the patient would be medically stable then the leading physician would decide to send a request for a PT. The goal is to get the patients moving as soon as possible. Then both the physician and the PT would decide if the patient would be safe enough to go home.

The goal for an OutPatient clinic would be to relieve the patient from pain and to improve their functions of life.

Favorite part of your job: “When you get to meet different people and different walks of life, when you get to help them and relieve their pain even as simple as a headache, it feels fulfilling when your skill set has made a difference in their life.” -Christain Vertudes

Most surprising part of your career: When you make the difference in someone’s life.  This still surprises him till this day and this gives off the feeling of satisfaction. 

Most Challenging part: 

The most challenging part of being a PT would be working with another clinician or referring clinician and both people are unable to come to an agreement about the patient’s care. As well as working with a clinician that is not equally involved with the patient or is not as involved as can be with a patient is also frustrating. 

Advice for someone going into PT: “To keep an open mind about the profession, there are different specialities with PT and you can get creative.”

Can you explain the difference between PT and OT (patients tend to mix up PT and OT):

Physical Therapy is mainly based on functional mobility of the patient, bed mobility, transferring and walking.

Occupational Therapy has a few overlapping things. It specializes more on fine motor skills, ADLS (Active Daily Living) such as bathing, grooming, and dressing.

What is the most common injury or body part that you mainly see on a daily basis:

“Body parts and injuries depend on the season, it’s not based on whether you see more backs or shoulders, there is always a combination of things to see. The seasons make the biggest difference and will show the biggest trend within injuries.”

Take Away from the Interview:

I think the biggest take away for me personally would be to not limit myself to other professions and to become familiar with different people that work in different fields. I can then learn about their experiences and have takeaways from their experiences.