About

If you have ever asked yourself any of the questions below, you're in the right place.

• "How can I improve my clinical skills?"
• "How can I keep up to date with the latest research?"
• "Which exercises should I get my patients to perform?"
• "How can I be really specific with the treatment or strengthening programs I give to my patients?"
• "What is the best manual therapy to perform, and when should I do it?" 
• "When can a joint injury such as an AC Joint injury or Acetabular Labral tear be treated conservatively and when does it need surgery?"  

What to expect

I believe Physiotherapists and Physical Therapists that want great results with their patients must stay up to date and become master clinicians and communicators, with excellent clinical reasoning. 

How can you find the time to keep up to date on the latest research when you are working in your clinic treating patients all week? Instead of reading hundreds of textbooks and thousands of research papers, become a Clinical Edge member to get the best results possible with your patients, and gain a lot of job satisfaction.

We help you explore the answers to these questions with online courses and conferences, and face to face courses. Every month we release new videos to help you discover practical ways to improve your assessment and treatment. 

How would it change your practice if you were able to be more specific with your treatment of shoulder pain? How would you feel if you were able to confidently identify what you need to treat and consistently achieve great results with your treatment? What if you were the go to person in your area for musculoskeletal pain?

At Clinical Edge, we provide education for Physiotherapists/Physical Therapists with a practical focus, that you can use immediately in the clinic. You will feel more confident in your treatment, get consistently great results with your treatment, and ultimately get more job satisfaction, a list of patients that love your treatment and a thriving physio practice. 

About David Pope

Follow David on Twitter @davidkpope

Clinical Edge was founded by David Pope (Physiotherapist), an Australia APA Titled Musculoskeletal and Sports Physiotherapist.

David's story

My 53 year old patient looked at me expectantly after I finished performing my last assessment test. All I could hear was the air-conditioning, the Physio in the next treatment rooms talking to their patient about knee osteoarthritis, my breathing, and the thoughts “How can every test be painful? I’ve done a bunch of tests, and almost every single one was painful. Now what? How am I going to tell her what’s wrong with her low back, and help her get better, when I don’t have any idea?”

It was 2001, I was a new graduate Physio performing an Outpatients rotation at the local hospital, and I felt completely out of my depth. There were too many body parts, too many questions I had to ask, too many diagnoses that I seemed to have no idea how to make, and nowhere near enough treatments that seemed to make any difference to patients' pain. It was overwhelming, mentally exhausting, and the lack of improvements in patients' pain was pretty demoralising.

I downloaded and used exercise programs in randomised control trials (RCT’s). I asked every Physio I knew for advice on assessment, treatment or specific patients, read textbooks and tried everything I learned with patients.

Conferences, weekend courses and evening lectures popped onto my radar. I enrolled on, and later started organising courses on manual therapy and muscle energy techniques, acupuncture, dry needling, anatomy, neurodynamics and pain courses.

Adding all these tools to my toolbox helped improve my treatment results, which built my confidence, but I knew there was still so much to learn.

One major challenge I faced was trying to stay up to date while living on the Central Coast of NSW, a regional area that’s a couple of hours from the closest face to face continuing education courses in Sydney.

One night in the winter of 2009 I travelled to Sydney with a couple of Physio friends for a one hour evening lecture on foot and ankle pain. The lecture was good, we had takeaway for dinner, and got home at 11pm after a 6 hour round trip.

As good as the lecture was, a six hour round trip for a one hour lecture didn’t seem like a sustainable, effective way to stay up to date. I knew if I was struggling with this, other therapists must be struggling with the very same problem. There had to be a better way to stay up to date without any travel.

I started working on solving this issue the very next week, creating and launching Clinical Edge online education and the Physio Edge podcast in 2010. I really wanted to make it easy for Physios to access the best Physiotherapists & presenters, stay up to date with the latest evidence and develop practical skills that could be used with patients immediately.

Leading Physiotherapists and Physical therapists from around the world recorded webinar and video presentations for Clinical Edge online education, and interviews for the Physio Edge podcast.

I loved recording the Physio Edge podcast, sharing great info with therapists all over the world, and the podcast quickly developed a huge listener base, with over 4 million podcast downloads to date.

Our Clinical Edge members loved the quality, practical nature, and ease of access of our online presentations, and I got a real feeling of satisfaction from receiving emails like this one from Tracey:

“Thanks heaps for the great content and podcasts etc that clinical edge provides. Living in a rural area can make it hard to get PD up so having an online resource is perfect!”

I knew that to ensure all our online presentations were current, evidence-based and clinically effective, get the most clinically relevant info from guests during podcasts, and improve my ability to successfully treat complex patients, it was time to boost my clinical reasoning and skills.

It was time for me to complete formal post-graduate Uni qualifications, and I enrolled in the Griffith University Masters of Musculoskeletal & Sports Physiotherapy. Over 2015 and 2016 I spent 30 hours or more each week completing my Masters, from home and on campus, while running Clinical Edge and a busy patient caseload, which was challenging and extremely rewarding at the same time. When adding up the costs of Uni fees, travel, accommodation and time off work, I invested somewhere around $100,000.00AUD and thousands of hours into the two year program.

Throughout my post-graduate studies, including clinical placements at the University clinic, our supervisors tested, pulled apart and helped reshape our clinical reasoning and knowledge. With both distance education and on-campus blocks each year, my clinical skills and results developed significantly. My new skills, knowledge and reasoning made treating patients really enjoyable. I looked forward to the challenge of treating complex patients, asked better questions, simplified my objective assessment and clearly understood the results of every test I performed. My patients got better results, and I felt a lot more satisfied at the end of the week.

I want you to feel that way too. To enjoy treating complex patients, asking great questions that guide your assessment, for your assessment results to be clear and guide your treatment. To give your patients clear guidance on how long their injury will take to get better, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from great treatment results and helping patients get back to the activities they love.

I share my time between working in my own clinic in Terrigal, NSW Australia, where I treat a variety of sports and musculoskeletal patients, and providing education through Clinical Edge. In my clinical practice I use a combination of evidence based assessment and treatment, movement analysis, manual therapy, motor control and strengthening, to get clinical results and help me love my job as a Physio.

My passions outside of work include mountain biking every chance I get, surfing, lifting weights and other heavy objects, hiking and playing with my kids.

Where are we located

Clinical Edge is an Australian company, based in Wamberal NSW, a beautiful part of the East Coast of Australia, in between Sydney and Newcastle. We have a lot of fantastic beaches and national parks really close by.

If you would like to contact us, you can email info(at)clinicaledge.co We have given an actual @ symbol a miss, to try and avoid internet robots "scraping" the email address, but you will need to use a real @ symbol in there.

Our address is 86 Ocean View Dr Wamberal NSW 2260. Our ABN is 15 140 580 123.

David can be located on Twitter at https://twitter.com/davidkpope