2023-10-18
AI in Physical Therapy: Benefits & Challenges in 2023

AI in Physical Therapy: Benefits & Challenges in 2023

Man holding phone in hand with ChatGPT web page open

Are you struggling to produce engaging content for your physical therapy business?

Is your content creation funnel dry due to an insufficient budget to hire a proper content creation team?

The schedule of an average physical therapist is already as hectic as a New York subway train. Hence, making content consistently all by yourself can be nerve-wracking.

What if we told you there’s a new content-creation assistant in town that charges next to nothing and gets the job done quickly? 

If you cannot afford to spend days stuck on a single content project and do not have a big budget to hire a team of professionals, your best bet is to assign some of your tedious content-creation tasks to Generative AI tools like Lex, ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.

Here, we will discuss the strategies physical therapy practice owners like you use to beat billion-dollar companies in their own game. We will teach you how to create repost-worthy content that converts your potential clients to long-term clients and enlighten you on the types of content for which you should use generative AI for. 

Outline

  • What is AI content creation?
  • Brief History of Generative AI: The Pursuit of Industrial Effectiveness 
  • How does AI content creation work?
  • How can AI be used for physical therapy content creation?
  • What are the pros and cons of AI content creation tools?

What is AI content creation?

AI content creation is the production of media content like text, images, videos, gifs, and other types of media content using Generative AI.

Generative AI was designed to mimic the “human voice” and churn out valuable content quickly. We refer to it as the talking Google. 

However, unlike Google, AI chatbots can create synthetic media based on the data inputted into its system.

Brief History of Generative AI: The Pursuit of Industrial Effectiveness

Generative AI is the final piece of our industrial puzzle. The puzzle we’ve not been able to solve since the first machine was created in Egypt around 3000 BC.

Human beings see the world through the lens of sentiments and are held back by their physical and mental restraints. Many great people have been handicapped by their personal beliefs, which are not necessarily true. Homo sapiens are not perfect machines.

Unlike humans, AI is without sentiments, false beliefs, and physical restrictions. As long as your prompt is inputted correctly and it has access to a “bagful” of relevant data, generative AI will give you up-to-date content any time of the day.

AI has been used for years before it became a hot internet topic. Tools like Grammarly, Siri, and Alexa have been using artificial intelligence before the current AI boom ushered in by ChatGPT, Dalle, and a host of other new-generation AI tools.

AI tech has been in existence since the 80s. In fact, there was an AI boom between 1980 and 1987.

The current boom we’re experiencing in the AI industry is championed by business organizations willing to reduce labor wages, boost profits, and increase their work efficiency.

Although there are many applications of artificial intelligence technology in physical therapy, here, we will talk about how you can use AI to create more relevant and engaging content.

How does AI content creation work?

Generative AI uses a generative model, a statistical model of the joint probability distribution P(X, Y). Where X is the known variable, and Y is the unknown variable.

It creates magical content, thanks to a web of machine learning algorithms called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Algorithms make artificial intelligence better, but they aren’t the same thing. They work together.

It’s quite simple. You provide the AI with a prompt. Then it uses X, the information it has to derive Y, the solution you want. 

We won’t discuss another model in this piece called the discriminative model. However, it’s worth noting that advanced versions of AI tools might employ various models while tackling various problems.

How can AI be used for physical therapy content creation?

You can boost your content productivity with AI tools in many ways. Below are a few of the down-to-earth use cases of artificial intelligence tools.

Generate fresh ideas

The biggest hurdle in content creation is not execution but idea generation. 

Due to the crowdedness of the internet space, people have become resistant to conventional ideas. You ought to find novel ways to present the same relevant things people care about to get their attention faster and more efficiently.

Coming up with new ideas becomes harder when you have to cater to clients from 9-5 and barely have time for yourself. The air-tight nature of the physical therapy profession can make the last brick of creativity in you sublime into thin air. 

Hence, you need an assistant to get the juice flowing. Instead of a human assistant, which can be difficult to manage and expensive to hire, you can use AI assistants like Alex and ChatGPT.

To generate ideas using ChatGPT, you need to provide the AI assistant with the context of your work and the prompt (what you want it to do).

Let’s say you’re writing an article on the best ways to tackle back pain, you can mine ideas from ChatGPT using the context + prompt formula. 

For example:

Context: I’m working on a back pain article for my physical therapy blog. 

Prompt: Suggest 10 titles for back pain. 

Instead of 10 titles, you can ask for more. Also, it doesn’t have to be a blog; you can apply the context + format formula to Twitter captions, newsletters, and YouTube scripts. 

It’s important to tweak the AI suggestions to give it the divine-human touch. That way, you can eliminate content creation blocks and generate the best content ideas for your physical therapy blog, newsletter, or social media page.

Draft a quick outline for your long-form articles

After coming up with the perfect article idea for your next physical therapy long-form post using ChatGPT, you need an outline that guides your research and story writing.

An outline does not have to be perfect at first. You can add new headings and subheadings as you continue developing your story.

If you want to try different AI chatbots besides chatGPT for your outline, other alternatives include Jasper, Chatsonic, and writesonic.

We prompted ChatGPT to prepare an outline for the blog post titled “How to get rid of leg pain.” Check the result of our prompt below.

The only downside of using ChatGPT for creating outlines is that it will provide you with generic outlines that mirror readymade articles online.

If you copy and paste the outline without tweaking it, your article will look like a ghost of the articles of other creators, meaning it won’t stand out.

The same rule applies to articles. We do not recommend using Chatbot AI to generate SEO content, as such action can destroy your site’s SEO ranking. 

One thing Google hates more than buying backlinks is publishing plagiarized content. The Google algorithm has been trained to punish spammy websites and reward websites that put our original content. 

Although Google hasn’t published its stance on AI-generated content, it is openly against spammy articles and plagiarism. AI doesn’t generate new content, as many would like you to believe. Instead, it creates generic content from the data bank (other people’s works) provided by its administrators.

AI is not a replacement for a writer. It’s simply a tool for writing better articles.

Conduct Research 

As mentioned earlier, chatbot tools like ChatGPT are more interactive versions of Google dubbed the talking Google. 

One of the many limitations of Google is its inability to guide you toward the answers you desire. It’s only a recommendation algorithm meant to give you access to the best articles on the keywords you searched for.

While you will still need to read more on the topic you’re working on, chatting with AI Chatbot tools can help you shape your opinion on the topics faster. 

You can also use ChatGPT for SEO keyword research. If you asked us if it was safe one week before now, we would have said capital NO. 

However, the company Open AI announced that ChatGPT can now browse the internet in real time. As reported by BBC, the AI tool can now access current data from the internet.

In the past, ChatGPT could only access materials and information from 2021. Now, it can give you the most relevant keywords in real-time.

Other examples of keyword research tools include Textoptimizer, a free keyword research tool, and SEO Surfer.

Edit and proofread your articles with AI tools 

When writing, creatives skip words in between sentences. It’s not abnormal to miss a few punctuation marks, especially when trying to get your ideas out as soon as possible.

Outstanding ideas, when not properly executed, evaporate easily. 

Once you’ve assembled your collage of ideas into a draft, you will have to edit it before publishing it.

Grammarly helps you correct bad sentences and rectify faulty phrases. It helps you limit tautology and give your articles better form.

The best part of Grammarly is the ability to shape your story tone based on your specifications. The tone detector feature lets you set your preferred brand tone on the app. 

The default tones include inspirational, confident, and anticipatory.

Grammarly has a free version, but the paid version goes for $12 monthly for annual payments and $30 monthly.

Boost content accessibility

Unlike popular belief, great content barely sells itself. On the other hand, great marketing strategies amplify great content. 

You’ve written a killer article that the whole world needs to read, but you need to make it accessible to the Gen Zs on Instagram and the millennials on Facebook. 

Both generations are miles apart, and if you’re isolated from the internet like most health workers, there’s a high probability that you are ill-informed on the right internet lingo to use for a specific audience. AI can help you rewrite your content to appeal to a certain demographic. 

Peep the picture below to see how ChatGPT can be used to tailor your formal content for a certain demographic. In the screenshot below, I asked the AI assistant to help rewrite a paragraph I wrote with a serious tone. Guess what! The tool did justice to the task. 

Other ways you can make great content accessible to your audience using AI include:

  • Language Translation
  • Audio description 
  • Captioning
  • Text to speech
  • Image recognition 
  • Text-to-speech
  • Create nice visuals for your content 

Pros and Cons of AI Content Creation

All that glitters is not gold. While AI has its benefits, it also has its disadvantages. Below are the pros and cons of using AI content creation tools.

Pros:

  • More interactive and intelligent than Google.
  • It makes your content production process faster and more efficient.
  • It provides insights into the topic you’re working on, unlike Google.
  • Helps personalize your content the way you want them.
  • Improves the quality of your content.
  • Helps writers overcome writer’s block.

Cons: 

  • Its data is limited to a certain year.
  • It sometimes spits out false information. So, in fields like physical therapy or medicine, relying on AI to write articles can get your brand in trouble or, at worst, harm your clients. 
  • People can fish out AI-created content, and you can get into trouble for not being authentic or professional enough. It’s meant to be an assistant and not a writer. Telling AI to write an article for you is bad practice. It can harm those you seek to protect as a physical therapist. 
  • AI tools might make up false information. Fact-checking every tip or fact you get from AI Chatbots is important.
  • Content generated via AI Chatbot might sound robotic.
  • It provides plagiarised content that can reduce your Google SEO ranking.
  • You cannot guarantee the safety of whatever user data you input into artificial intelligent tools.
  • It has limited knowledge in professional matters where little information is online regarding that topic.
  • It can get you in legal trouble when used it create longform content.

Key Takeaways 

  • Use the prompt and context formula to get the best results out of AI chatbots.
  • Employ artificial intelligence tools as writing accessories. Understand that they cannot replace writers.
  • Factcheck every data you get from AI chatbots.
  • Bridge the gap between your brand and specific demographics with the aid of AI tools.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, the tools are only as good as the person handling them. If an amateur writer uses AI to create content, the result will be half-baked. If you learn to use AI tech to your favor and keep honing your content creation tool, rest assured that your content will improve over time. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. How you react to the development depends on you.