@TheOncoPT – Dr. Elise K Cantu (00:19)
If you’ve ever sat down to start your case report and just stared at the screen, you’re not broken, you’re not behind. You’re just missing a process. And that’s exactly what this video is.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after helping a lot of oncology physical therapists through their specialization journey. The case report writing itself usually isn’t the hard part. It’s knowing what done, what finished with your case report truly looks like.

You’ve got a case report requirement sitting on top of everything else that you’re managing. A full caseload. Your family. Maybe some hobbies thrown in there. And yeah, that specialty application looming over your head.

And your case report just feels like this open-ended thing with no clear finish line. That ambiguity is what causes this paralysis, not a lack of writing skill on your part. So let’s give your case report structure.

The goal here is to move through a defined pipeline, not to write a perfect paper on day one, because let’s face it, that’s impossible. We are going to break down this process into four manageable phases.

First up is your foundation phase, and this is where you find your story and do your homework to prepare for the writing part. Because next up is the drafting phase. And this is all about getting words out of your brain and onto paper, but in a smart and methodical way.

Third is the polish phase, and this is for refining your case report, getting feedback, and crafting the parts that are going to make a killer first impression with ABPTS. And finally, we have the submission phase. We will tackle the administrative hurdles to get your paper out the door and actually into the world so it’s out of your hair.

Now this four-phase system is designed to help you build momentum. So by the time that your deadline hits, you’re not scrambling, you are submitting and not panicking.

The initial phase is the most important, and I’m not exaggerating here, because getting this phase right is going to set up the rest of your writing journey to be about 10 times easier than what it would be otherwise. This is all about making sure you pick the right case and figuring out where it kind of fits in the universe of demonstrating your expertise. So, first, of course, you need to find your perfect patient case.

Not every interesting case that you have encountered over the course of your career is going to make for a great case report. A publishable case report, a submittable case report for ABPTS, almost always is going to describe something that’s a little outside of the ordinary. Maybe it’s a rare diagnosis. Maybe it’s actually a common diagnosis that’s presenting in a really unique or weird way. Maybe it’s an unexpected treatment outcome, or maybe it’s a unique diagnostic treatment puzzle.

For your physical therapist brain. But the key here is to ask yourself one simple question. What will the reader, what will the clinician reading this, learn that they couldn’t already know, that they couldn’t read from a textbook or the available literature? And if you’ve got a solid answer to this, it’s probably a strong contender for your case report.

Once you think you have a strong case, you need to grab a mentor or a colleague or someone who’s been through this process before for a quick chat. They have the experience and the perspective and a little bit of a zoomed-out view to be able to tell you if your case is genuinely novel enough, or if it’s kind of same old, same old. This one conversation could save you weeks of wasted effort and help you really zoom in on: yes, this is the case that I’m going to move forward with.

PS, if you need help with this really important decision, I’ve got a free tool called Case Report Idea Generator linked below this video for you.

With your case now locked in, it’s time to do a light literature review, and I say light on purpose.

And I don’t want you to skip this because what we’re looking for is to kind of see where your case fits within the greater scope of our understanding of cancer rehab. A classic writing mistake is to pick a patient, to start your writing, and then get into the literature only to discover that this unique presentation or phenomenon that you are going to be talking about is actually really well documented in the literature. It’s not new, it’s not novel, it’s not going to change anybody’s experience, understanding, or

even perspective on this.

Now your goal here is twofold.

First, you’re going to confirm your case’s novelty or the uniqueness of it. And second, you’re going to understand the existing conversation around that topic. So use your trusty databases like PubMed, Google Scholar, and others that you know to look for similar cases, not necessarily the same, right? Because you probably have something that’s a little unique. You’re looking for similar cases, similar information on the diagnosis, the patient population, the treatments, the physical therapy interventions.

etc. so that you can understand again where your case fits within all of this.

You’re looking for information on what’s out there and how your case is potentially different or unique from what is already published. Now, this review doesn’t just check a box that you need for your case report. It’s going to give you the context so that you can write a killer introduction. Your introduction is where you really define this is what’s going on, this is what is the gap or the problem, and here’s why this case actually matters.

Which brings us into phase two, which is that drafting phase.

Alright, time to face the blank page. But you’re not going to start this process feeling intimidated because we’re gonna take the pressure off. You are not trying to create the perfect page or the perfect paragraph or even the perfect sentence. You are just building a skeleton right now. The most paralyzing part of case report writing is feeling like you have to create a masterpiece from scratch, from the get-go. And the fix to all of this is making the blank page not blank anymore.

With a simple outline.

So you’re gonna use a structure that is very common to most scientific papers you’ve probably read before.

this is the IMRAD format, IMRD. So introduction, methods, results, and discussion. Now for your case report, we’re gonna tweak it just a little bit, but we’re generally following the same flow. So I like to call this the introduction, case presentation, discussion, and conclusion. And we are just starting with these few sections. And we’re not even gonna write sentences yet.

So before you write a single sentence of your case report, you need to open up your doc or pull out your notebook if you’re gonna write starting this process, and you are going to write down or type out those headings. Under each of those headings, you are then going to jot down a few bullet points, not sentences, not paragraphs, just jot down a few bullet points of what you plan to cover under each of those headings.

Now we draft, but not in the order that you think. And this is a pro tip that I have discovered over my years of coaching other physical therapists through this process. We are actually going to start with the easiest part of your case report, and that is the case presentation. Now, this is the heart of your report. This is the patient’s story, and you know this better than anyone else. You are going to tell the patient’s story chronologically and

Objectively. So, in the order that it happened and give me the facts. You’re going to talk about the patient, of course, de-identified in your case report. You’re going to talk about their diagnosis, their treatment journey, what impairments they’re experiencing, when they came to see you, what you did with them, what were the outcomes of that, etc. The goal here is clarity and completeness. You’re not interpreting anything just yet. You are simply presenting the facts as they happened.

now once your case presentation is down, you have your raw material that you can really build from. So you’re going to circle back to the introduction. And I want you to think of the introduction as like a funnel. So wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. And you’re going to start broad by summarizing briefly.

What’s known about this person’s condition or their a diagnosis, their impairments, whatever that is, that uniqueness that really drew you to this case report. And then you’re gonna narrow it down to what’s not known or what’s rare or less understood about this phenomenon. And this is where you really build from that brief literature review that we talked about previously.

Finally, you are going to bring it all home to your specific case and state clearly what is unique about this case and what is going to add to the conversation, to our greater understanding of cancer rehab as a whole. A strong introduction is going to convince the graders at ABPTS that your case report is worth their time and therefore worth finishing when they start to read it.

finally you’ll tackle your discussion. This is where you switch from being the storyteller in the case presentation to the scientist that you are.

It is probably one of the most challenging sections of your case report, but it’s also the most important because here is where you interpret your findings. So you’re going to start by summarizing the key feature of your case, right? What is that unique phenomenon we’ve been talking about? And then you’re going to compare and contrast your case with what you found in your literature review previously.

What makes your case similar? What makes your case different? And you’re going to offer a plausible explanation for the outcomes that you saw, right? This is what happened, because we talked about that already in your case presentation. This is why I think that happened. And what are the take-home lessons for the clinician who’s going to be reading this in the future?

And now we move into phase three, which is the polish phase. Your draft is now done. It might be rough, that’s okay, but the core of your case report is all there. And phase three is all about the refinement and getting the packaging of your case report right. So first step is you’re actually gonna remove yourself from this process. You need fresh eyes on your case report. No manuscript, case report, article, et cetera, is written in a vacuum.

You are going to send your draft to reviewers. These are mentors, these are colleagues, maybe the ones you bugged earlier to help you with this process. You’re going to give them a clear deadline by which they need to return their very clear feedback to you and constructive criticism that you can then take to make your case report stronger.

now ideally when you send your draft to your reviewers, your entire case report is done from start to finish, from title to references. If you’re in a crunch, you can send the main body of your case report to your reviewers, and then you continue working on other sections. But I’ll leave you to decide which method is best for you right now.

So while you’re waiting on your reviewer feedback, you can now go back to those parts that you very intentionally cleverly saved for later. So now’s the time to be writing your abstract, your title, your keywords, and kind of the other like finishing touches on your case report. It is an absolute rookie mistake to try to start these first in the case report writing process because these act as kind of the summaries of your case report.

And how can you effectively write a summary if you don’t actually know what your case report is really going to encompass? So when you go to write your abstract, remember this is a quick summary of your case. It usually covers the intro, kind of the here’s what happened in the case, and then your main conclusions. Now make sure that you follow ABPTS’s guidelines on how long your abstract needs to be, because it’s usually pretty tight when it comes to word count.

Next, you’re going to craft your title. Now, I want you to think of the title in the abstract as like the movie trailer for your case report. They are going to really tell the viewer if it’s worth them to actually pick up and read your case report to completion. A good title for your case report should be descriptive, it should include the main diagnosis or like the phenomenon that is the focus of your case report and end with the words, a case report.

So for example, instead of a vague title like an interesting prehab case, go for something specific like prehabilitation for hematopoietic stem cell transplant and outpatient physical therapy, a case report. That was my title for my case report. Something like this is specific and it’s informative, and it lets the grader know exactly what they’re getting themselves into.

Finally, you’ll format your references. I know this can be a tedious process and it’s like the least fun part of your case report.

It is essential. And ABPTS has very specific requirements for how they want you to format your case report references. So please make sure that you are referencing the latest ABPTS candidate guide for all of that information. now when you’re working on your references, I would use placeholders as you’re typing out your case report, and then only at the very end.

When you are all finished with your case report, do you go back and insert the correct citations and then you order them in the final order in your list of references at the very end? Ask me how I know.

That if you try to do this before you’re done with your case report, it is a complete pain in the neck. cause that’s what made me almost not finish my case report in time for the deadline. So track your stuff as you go, but finalize those references as the very, very last thing you do in the entire case report process.

And make sure you check the formatting of your references before you submit. Because this is a really silly reason why I see some case reports not get submitted, because when they are copied and pasted into the application portal, they don’t format appropriately. So just check them, just make sure that there’s nothing funky in there before you hit that submit button.

Now it’s time for phase four, which is the submission phase. You are finally in the home stretch, my friend. Your manuscript is revised, your abstract and your title are sharp, and your references are in order because you followed the path here. This final phase is about finishing the race all the way to the finish line, not tripping before you get there. This is where you submit your case report to the application portal.

So you will now take your case report that you have finished, that you have poured so much love and hard work into, and you are going to copy and paste each section of your case report into the corresponding text box in the application portal. Make sure that as you go, you are checking each of your sections of your case report for any formatting errors, any missing text or other problems as you go. You are then going to read your case report.

line by line, section by section, in the application portal as you’ve copied and pasted it, at least once before you’re ready to hit submit. once you hit that submit button, make sure to take a second to appreciate what you have done.

You went from a blank page and a whole lot of dread, maybe a little bit of panic, to a complete submission-ready case report for your ABPTS oncology specialty certification application. That’s tremendous. That’s huge. And it deserves to be recognized in this moment.

So there you have it, the exact four-phase process to get you from a blank page to a finished case report that you can submit. We have moved from building a solid foundation by picking the right case for your case report to a structured,

very intentional drafting phase to the polish phase where we made your case report shine and finally all the way through the submission process to a submitted case report. The key takeaway here is that writing a case report isn’t about some magical burst of inspiration that strikes you like a lightning bolt. It is a systematic process and by breaking it down into these very manageable four phases, you can replace your anxiety with action.

And replace your uncertainty with a clear path forward. You don’t have to feel ready to start. In fact, this is the biggest trick that we tell ourselves. I’ll start when I feel inspired, when I feel ready. My friend, that day is never going to come. You don’t need to feel ready to get started. You just need to get started and follow this four-phase workflow.

If you want to go through this four-phase process with actual guidance and feedback at every phase instead of doing it alone, that’s exactly what I built Case Report Writing Workshop for. The link is in the description below.

Next week, I’m going to tell you about one of my case report writing workshop clients who took this exact process, wrote a bomb case report that was accepted by ABPTS, and ended up published in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s right. She took this one extra step because her case report was literally that good. You do not want to miss next week’s video.

And if you found this video helpful, please make sure that you’re subscribed. I put out new content every week for oncology physical therapists, and I will see you in the next one.