About your medical rights in Austin. Specifically regarding physical therapy

This is a re-post of an e-mail from my friend and collegue, Allan Besselink, an Austin physical therapist and fellow trainer in the Austin area. Please educate yourselves:

Hello everyone:

I just wanted to send out a quick note to you regarding an important issue in our health care system. Direct access to physical therapy is currently in front of the Texas and California legislatures. This is a huge consumer issue nationwide. In Texas, we are one of few remaining health care providers that require a referral from a "gatekeeper". A patient can't simply go to a physical therapist, regardless of the problem. Unfortunately, consumers do not realize this!

I have been posting information on this topic regularly on my website (http://www.smartsport.info). The direct access discussion thread on my website now has over 1700 hits - of which about 600 have come in the past 10 days!

With this in mind, I am dedicating tomorrow's episode of "Consumer's Guide to Health" on BlogTalkRadio specifically to the topic of direct access. This 30 min show is a call-in online talk radio format. You can find the show information at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/abesselink. The call-in number is (646) 929-1567. The show begins at 8:00 pm central time and live streams for 30 minutes - but the discussion may go beyond this. Afterwards, a podcast is available for download from the website and from iTunes.

Please pass this along to your friends, your family, your colleagues, and to any consumers concerned about their access to health care, the cost of their health care, and the right to choose the providers of their health care!

I hope you can join me for the discussion.

All the best,

Allan