Muscle Strength
Introduction
An assessment of muscle strength
is typically performed as part of a patient's objective assessment. This should
assist the physiotherapist's clinical reasoning and enable them to reason an
appropriate point to begin strengthening rehabilitation from. Muscle
strength can be assessed by a number of methods: manually, functionally or
mechanically.
The Oxford Scale
The Oxford scale is commonly used by
physiotherapists to manually assess muscle strength. According to the Oxford
scale, muscle strength is graded 0 to 5. The grades are summarised below:
- Flicker of
movement
- Through
full range actively with gravity counterbalanced
- Through
full range actively against gravity
- Through
full range actively against some resistance
- Through
full range actively against strong resistance
- poor
functional relevance;
- non-linearity
( the difference between grades 3 and 4 is not necessarily the same as the
difference between grades 4 and 5);
- a patient's
variability over time (for example, alternating between grades due to
fatigue);
- intra-rater
reliability
- only
assesses muscles when contracting concentrically
- the
difficulty of applying the Oxford scale to all patient's in clincal
practice (so that strength is rarely assessed throughout full range as
many patients assessed by physiotherapists do not possess full range due
to their repsecitve pathology.
Due to these shortcomings, physiotherapists
commonly use modifed versions of the Oxford scale in clinical practice .
মন্তব্যসমূহ
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন