Not long ago, I got a leopard-print headband—the kind meant to keep your hair back while washing your face or doing your skincare routine. It has two bendy pieces at the top, and naturally, I assumed they were just cute animal ears.
Except… they weren’t ears.
Turns out, those bendy pieces are meant to pull your hair back, like a ponytail holder. A super smart, thoughtful design—and I completely missed it. Until my sister said something, casually pointing out that I was wearing the headband BACKWARDS.
Cue a very humbling moment. 😅
But this silly experience got me thinking:
How many times are we absolutely sure we know what we’re doing… until someone gives us feedback that changes everything?
We All Have Blind Spots—Even in Oncology Rehab
As oncology physical therapists, we deal with complexity every single day. Our patients are medically fragile, often dealing with life-altering diagnoses, and we’re navigating nuance at every turn.
And even when we’re experienced, thoughtful clinicians… we still have blind spots.
It could be:
- A treatment approach that needs fine-tuning.
- A patient’s behavior we misinterpreted.
- A care plan that doesn’t fully reflect the patient’s priorities.
When you’re in it every day, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Feedback—whether it’s from a colleague, a mentor, or even a patient—helps us reframe, reimagine, and refine.
Feedback Isn’t Failure—It’s Growth
Sometimes we avoid feedback because we’re afraid it’ll mean we’re “not good enough.” But in reality, feedback is how we get better.
It helps you:
- Strengthen clinical reasoning
- Communicate more clearly
- Catch documentation gaps
- Build confidence in tricky situations
And this applies whether you’re treating patients, teaching students, or writing your ABPTS Oncology Case Report.
Speaking of Your Case Report…
If you’re currently working on your ABPTS case report, this should hit home.
You know your case inside and out. But chances are, you’re too close to it to spot what’s unclear, what’s missing, or what the reviewers might get hung up on.
That’s where structured feedback can be a game changer.
Inside my Case Report Writing Workshop, I don’t just help you with outlines and timelines—I help you get targeted feedback on your writing so that your case report reflects the incredible clinician you already are.
>>Get started on your case report today with Case Report Writing Workshop.<<
P.S. not sure if you’re ready? Watch this free masterclass on The 3 Step Framework for a Finished Case Report.
What This Silly Headband Taught Me:
That headband story? It was funny, but also a wake-up call.
Whether you’re dealing with leopard print ears or leukemia rehab plans, we all benefit from feedback.
So here’s your nudge:
- Ask for the insight.
- Invite the extra pair of eyes.
- Be open to a different perspective.
Because feedback doesn’t make you less of a professional—it makes you a better one.
Want to watch the episode instead?
Watch this week’s episode of TheOncoPT Podcast on our YouTube channel!
Transcript
Elise – @TheOncoPT (00:19)
Hey, Onco PT and welcome to this episode of the Onco PT podcast. I need to be completely transparent. You are going to laugh at me today and in fact, I would encourage it because this episode was inspired by a recent very humbling experience I had. So let’s get into it.
Couple months ago, I got this headband. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It is a headband that I got as part of a gift basket. It’s this like nice, soft texture, elastic, and it has these like little ear things. And it’s designed to help hold your hair back as you’re like washing your face, you know, applying your skincare, et cetera, okay?
I’ve seen some on TikTok and I was like, cute, but I’m not like a super makeup girly. Like I don’t watch all the makeup tutorials on like social media or whatever. So I’ve seen them. have, I have seen other people like briefly have something like this and wear them, but that that’s about it. Okay. So I was one morning and I had been wearing that, like I had been using this for probably close to a month and a half at this point, this headband. And so I’m getting ready in the morning.
and I was on the phone with my sister. I was on FaceTime and we were just chit chatting or whatever. And so I’m going to show you now actually on video. Again, if you’re watching this, you’ll be able to watch this live, but I’ll otherwise narrate it for you. So I have this headband on and I have it on as such. I know, I know. The headband is on and the ear things are in the front. I just was like, it’s like a cute little bow or something. Dear listener.
When I tell you the look that my sister gave me, she looked at me like I had two heads and then she just started to smile and laugh at me. And she’s like, so you know you have that on backwards, right?
Y’all. These ears that are on this headband are designed to go in the back and they bend together to make a little ponytail holder. They hold your hair back. They’re not decorative ears or whatever the heck I thought they were. And now that she explained it to me, I can’t unsee it. Like it makes complete sense what the heck is going on here. And I just…
It never clicked for me. I never put it together that these are not indeed cute little ears. Because again, the headband’s like a little animal print. I was like, it’s like a cute little animal print ear thing. No, no, y’all, it holds your hair back for when you’re washing your face and putting on your skincare. ⁓ this makes so much sense now.
And we had a good laugh while on FaceTime. And then we went about the rest of our day. And now I use the headband correctly every time that I use it. But I don’t do so without chuckling at myself also, because it’s always good to laugh at yourself. So the moral of this is I thought I was using the headband correctly. I looked like I knew what I was doing, or at least I thought I knew I looked like what I was doing. But I wasn’t. I was very, very wrong. And, you know.
Sometimes we have silly moments like this, you know, in our personal life. But sometimes this is also a great analogy to what’s happening in real life, right? With our own patients. Now, you know, this particular encounter was a headband specifically. But what a great reminder about how sometimes we can miss stuff. We can miss something obvious if we are too close to it.
Right, if we don’t have some kind of an outside perspective like my sister on FaceTime to say, hey, you’re not doing that quite right. Or maybe let’s make an adjustment here. I think it’s particularly easy to do this also in oncology rehab, in in OncoPT because we are constantly navigating.
nuance and complexity and adapting care for medically fragile patients. And for some of us, we might be practicing in big groups where you have lots of therapists to bounce ideas off of, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you are the only member of a very small team of oncology physical therapists working in your area. So you may not naturally get a lot of feedback on the day-to-day as you are actually working with your patients.
Even seasoned clinicians benefit from having another set of eyes. Again, y’all, I’ve been washing my face for years. Like, this is not a new thing. I’ve been pulling my hair back to get my hair out of my face when I wash my face, do my skincare, et cetera, for years. ⁓ And you’d think that I would know how to use a headband inherently like this. No, that was not at all the case. Feedback is not about, you’re wrong.
like, you made a mistake, you messed up. my gosh, we got to fix this. It’s all about growing and improving and catching things that we cannot see ourselves. Again, even as silly or as quote obvious as how wrongly I was wearing this headband, my friend. So examples of what this might look like in your day-to-day practice, for example, you’re treating cancer related fatigue, right?
but didn’t realize how much this person’s fear of insert X, Y, Z, right? Like maybe of the cancer itself, of maybe something that they were told or they heard previously about exercise and cancer. Maybe you didn’t realize how much fear was driving this person’s inactivity. And we know, you know, the relationship between inactivity and cancer-related fatigue, right? We know that cancer-related fatigue is improved.
by physical activity and exercise. So that’s one example. Another example could be that you think your exercise progression makes sense. Like on paper, in your brain, this is logical, it makes sense. But then a colleague might help you connect it more clearly to this patient’s lab values or like clinically what they are presenting with, what they’re experiencing. Another example, you present a journal club art.
And you’ve gone through the process of reading this article and interpreting it, drawing conclusions, and someone else’s question helps something click in your brain. Maybe it helps you rethink how this article and these takeaways, these lessons, these insights actually apply to your own caseload. We could go on. There’s so many different examples of this, but this is to highlight the role of feedback.
which is ultimately driving at helping us grow and improve our clinical practice and how we show up for our patients each and every day, especially when we are maybe working in a silo where we’ve got the blinders on and we’re just really focused on what we’re doing in getting in and getting out. We do not get better at OncoPT at cancer rehab in isolation. Our field is constantly evolving.
because cancer care is constantly evolving. We’re constantly hearing about new treatments and these new treatments come with side effects. our understanding of OncoPT is always deepening and widening, so always evolving, right? And if we’re not open to feedback, whether it’s informal, such as a FaceTime with my sister telling me that the headband was on backwards, or it’s peer-based, or it’s structured feedback,
Whatever that feedback is, if we don’t have it, we miss out. We risk falling behind. We risk staying stuck. And worst of all, we risk not actually helping our patients. And that is the greatest disservice that we can do. Is not the, I’ve talked about this previously, way back when I did an episode with Dr. Susan Maltser who is the lead author on that.
2017 article, A Focused Review of Safety Considerations in Cancer Rehab, which is my favorite article of all time. In this interview with Dr. Maltser, we talked about, we do no harm to our patients, but there’s a shift between doing no harm and actively helping patients. Of course, do no harm, right? But sometimes we do things out of an avoidance of harm rather than seeking to benefit our patients. It’s a really…
small shift, but it makes a big difference in how we show up with our patients. And I think this is a really great tie in to if we are not constantly seeking to learn and improve ourselves through feedback. Like again, this was really great feedback from Dr. Maltser to me on instead of thinking about avoiding things to avoid, or know, like do things to avoid harm, do things to actively benefit our patients. ⁓
Again, this context was bone metastasis. I think this applies in a lot of different areas. Now, feedback does not always have to be formal mentorship. It can be. That’s totally cool if it is. But maybe this is where we’re chatting with a colleague about a tricky patient case. Like, man, I am really struggling with Mrs. Smith and this is what’s going on. Do you have anything you can weigh in on here?
Maybe you’re asking someone to read over a progress note, right? More eyes to get on that progress note and say, have you considered XYZ before? Participating in a community, for example, AO, you know, we’ve got the cancer rehab community. We also have, if you’re interested, the OncoPT specialization community, which I will link in the show notes. You know, participating in some community that’s challenging your thinking in a good way.
This is what helps us become the confident, competent OncoPT and ultimately safer oncology rehab professional, right? I don’t think true confidence comes without having that confidence that knowledge tested first. I can’t truly be confident in what I’m telling a patient if I haven’t had to, know, kind of not defend, that seems like a very negative twist on that. But if I haven’t had to explain
why something is like this is what this is and why it’s not something else. I can’t truly be confident in knowing that, I feel very secure in what I’m saying here. Same thing with competence. I think competence goes along with that. I can’t get better. You can’t get better and more confident and competent in what you know unless that is being challenged and tested.
and kind of checked in on by others in our field. Because again, this is how we grow, this is how we evolve, this is how we improve our practice, which is going to benefit all of our patients. Now, I want you to zoom in right now. There’s lots of ways that we can apply feedback into our career. We’ve talked about some very specific, like, patient care examples, but one of the most powerful…
instances and frankly one of the most important areas that I really emphasize this and I encourage my like my students to ⁓ apply this in their own career is when it actually comes to your oncology specialty certification preparation. Now there’s different phases of this right there’s the application case report the actual studying for the exam but I think where this is most important especially right here right now is when it comes to writing your case report.
Here’s a great example of this. It is really easy to get very myopically focused on your case report because you spend so much time with your case report, with that case, doing the research, writing, rewriting, editing, drafting, et cetera. Sometimes we are a little too close to the problem. And because we’re so close, we can’t actually see the forest through the trees. And so when we take a step back and we have
other people’s eyeballs on it, it really helps to kind of get us out of that very zoomed in ⁓ experience, that perspective, so that we can really see the big picture of what’s going on. Great example of this again. So when I was writing my ⁓ maintenance of specialty certification case reflection, okay, so slightly different, but still part of the whole specialty certification stuff.
I had my sister read over. I really value my sister’s feedback if you couldn’t tell. She tells me when I’m wearing things backwards and I look stupid, but also she gives me great feedback on my case reports. So I was writing my case reflection for my maintenance cycle and she was able to kind of pull me out of, again, I was so close to this patient, to this patient case and what I was doing and why I was doing stuff that I kind of…
took a very, not kind of, I took a very circuitous path. So instead of going from point A to point B, I went like point A to H to Z to Q to C to B as I was writing this case reflection. And it made for a very convoluted and frankly confusing and out of order case reflection. And by having that feedback to say, doesn’t make total sense. ⁓ I get what you’re trying to say.
But there’s a lot of stuff that you could take out to make this a better case reflection. And that was very helpful. Ultimately, I was able to submit on that case reflection and it was accepted on the first try, which is always a really great relieving feeling to do. Now, how does this apply to your case report? Very similarly, right? But the case report is perhaps an even more important area where it’s so, so crucial to get feedback.
on your case report. Again, you spend so much time with it, you are so close to that material, sometimes we miss stuff that is frankly very obvious and glaring to others. So writing a case report, great, another just fabulous example of being so close to something you can’t even see when something is missing in front of you. You need outside feedback to make it stronger. Your case report is probably already amazing. I say that with full confidence.
but the way you’re presenting the material may not even do it justice. So it’s not even a you’re writing a bad case report. It’s you’re writing a case report that you don’t even.
It’s so good, but it’s not coming through in your writing yet. And with that feedback, it could be great. It could be fantastic. Again, when we do stuff in isolation by ourselves, we tend to miss these things. And so having these conversations, having this feedback is only going to help us improve. And again, maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe it is a great case report. And when you are having this,
feedback dialogue, you’re getting this feedback from your case report reviewers, right? People who are reading it before you actually submit it. You can then say, this is actually what I was doing, but maybe you need to make that justification of like, this is why I did what I did. Maybe that justification needs to be even stronger than what you have previously. Again, where that confidence and competence comes from, I believe, is from not just knowing the information, but being able to defend it. And again, I…
I need to workshop the word defend. I don’t know if that’s totally what I’m going for. But again, like having the security and saying, I know this is right and I know why this is not wrong.
That’s I think the phrase that I’m gonna go for on this right now. I’ll keep workshopping it, don’t worry. But having this feedback again is totally a transformational and necessary part of case report writing and I find that a lot of people who don’t have those reviewers, again, this is before you submit your case report, before you submit your application, maybe this is a friend, a colleague, a family member, another physical therapist somewhere who can help.
you reflect on and give you feedback on this information only helps to make your case report stronger. Now you may already have people lined up to help you with this process. Amazing. I love that. At the time of this recording, when this episode is going to be published, if you are trying to submit for that first deadline, I think it’s either June 30th or July 1st. I can’t remember. I always forget this part.
But whatever that first deadline is, if you are trying to submit your case report and application for that timeline, you need to have your reviewers lined up already. And I would also encourage you, even if you’re not, you know, if you’re listening to this somewhere down the road and you want to work on your case report, you know this is something you want to do. I would start planting the seeds now in those reviewers to say, hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Would you be willing to review my case report and then, you know, move forward from there?
But especially again, if you are listening to this, as this episode goes live, you are getting ready to submit your case report for this upcoming deadline. Now is the time, my friend, to line up those reviewers so that you can get that case report to them in time enough for them to read it thoroughly, give you feedback, and then give it back to you so that you can make the necessary adjustments and ultimately clean up your case report so it is submission ready.
So ideally you submit it on the first time and you don’t need any corrections. That is obviously like primo, primo goal, ideal ⁓ universe in which we live here. Now, if you’re maybe a little unsure, if maybe you are earlier in the process or you are like, my gosh, the deadline is just around the corner. I need to get this case report done ASAP and I need to get some feedback from someone who’s gone through this process. This is exactly why I built
case report writing workshop. It’s not just for the structure and the deadlines, which is a very important part of writing our case report and when I take you through the workshop. But this is also for real time helpful feedback that takes you from a pretty good case report to publication submission worthy case report. Right? This is what we’re going for here. We’re not going for good and we’re not just going for great. We’re going for outstanding, fantastic.
because I want you to submit that case report, wash your hands of it, and move on to other stuff in your life, right? The rest of your summer, spending time with your loved ones, ⁓ ultimately studying, right? That’s a later problem, that’s not a right now problem. But again, we can’t get there. Your case report is not going to get there without necessary feedback. Maybe that’s from me as part of Case Report Writing Workshop, maybe that’s from others.
But as long as you have that very, important feedback and you integrate that feedback, this is how your case report is going to be the strongest. And even if you’re like, at least I wrote my case report two years ago, not my problem, not my thing, feedback is still very, very necessary and important and has a role to play as on copetees, can constantly, right? This is not a one and done situation. This is over time. We are constantly going to be learning things.
And we constantly need to be getting that feedback to ensure we’re on the right track so that we can take what we’ve learned, implement it appropriately with our patients, and then learn our next lesson, whatever that is, right? So whether it’s a headband, again, my lovely headband here, or patient care, we all have blind spots. That’s part of being human. But the also glorious thing about being human is that we have colleagues and friends.
who can help us find those blind spots and ultimately like check on them, right? That’s why we have rear view mirrors to help us check out our blind spots so that we are safe on the road, right? Asking for feedback doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t make you less of an Onco PT, a specialist, an expert or whatever that is. It makes you someone who cares deeply about doing the best that you can and always seeking to improve.
prove what you are doing so that you can continue to get better time after time. You don’t have to do this alone. Actually, you shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t be doing this alone. Whether it’s writing your case report, treating a complex patient or showing up, excuse me, as a strong OncoPT That’s why community is so important. That’s why feedback from our community is so, important.
Whether it is a headband, like what we were talking about earlier in this episode, or your patient care, we all have blind spots. We all have areas where we need some outside perspective, some feedback, so that we can improve, so that we can get better, both for us, but for our patients, right? Our communities. Asking for feedback doesn’t make you less of an oncopeteer.
It makes you an OncoPT who cares deeply about showing up as the best version of yourself that you can day in and day out. You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, we don’t encourage that here at the OncoPT. That’s why we want feedback, right? Feedback from others to help us get better. So whether that’s writing your case report, navigating a complex patient case, or how to just show up as the better OncoPT,
than you were yesterday, feedback is so, so necessary and really, really helpful, especially for the longevity of your career.
So if you are in the process of writing your case report and you need that feedback, you want that feedback to take your case report from good to great, then you are going to love my signature program, Case Report Writing Workshop. You can register today at the oncopt.com slash workshop where you’ll find all of the information about Case Report Writing Workshop. But in summary, what you need to know is that in Case Report Writing Workshop, we take you from a blank page
to a finished first draft of your case report and beyond. Step by step, you will walk through what it takes to actually get your case report out of your brain and onto paper, how to get it ready for submission, how to solicit that specific feedback from your reviewers to make a really strong case report, and any last minute touches you need before it’s time to actually submit that case report. I know that you have a case report inside of you.
It’s now a matter of getting it out of your brain and onto paper so that you can submit it. So again, you can find that information at the OncoPT.com slash workshop, and I cannot wait to see you inside Case Report Writing Workshop. Until next time, this is Elise with the OncoPT. And remember, you are exactly the physical therapist that your patients with cancer need. So let’s get to work.