Students’ Understanding Physics Concept of Traction Therapy

Physics behind the medical care continue fascinates for medical science. Specially, traction therapy is widely performed in clinical situation as manipulation is a common problem treatment for orthopedic surgery patients. The Physics concept involves with traction therapy is Force and Motion. This article, therefore, builds on and contributes to work on learning how nursing students conceptual abstract principle in Physical therapy case. Participants were nurse students took Physics for Nurse Course in the first year of their Undergraduate education. This work used system thinking approach as teaching intervention and assessment tool to evaluate students understanding. Baseline research interest, two physical therapy situations; cervical and femur traction were proposed. Based on research objective, both cases were composed of integrating the scientific knowledge into the system thinking diagram and illustrating the scientific knowledge from the system thinking diagram into a word or assay. After seeing the typical response, less than a half of students groups could identified core content of Physical therapy such as the Newton's first law, Newton's third law (action-reaction force), Balance forces and Gravitational force. However, this learning strategy encouraged students to integrate knowledge into virtual problems.