Surveying Therapists on Seating Approaches for Patients with Muscular Dystrophy in Japan

Patients with muscular dystrophy (MD) need fitted wheelchairs. This study aimed to ascertain physiotherapists and occupational therapists’ opinions about the current wheelchair seating process for patients with MD in Japan. We identified 266 academic papers published between August 2014 and July 2019 with the keywords “muscular dystrophy” and either “physiotherapy” or “occupational therapy.” We then sent survey requests to 140 physiotherapists and occupational therapists (who were among the authors of the aforementioned papers), of whom 41 agreed to partake in this study. We found that the time required for each seating was 30–60 min for three types of MD, and the most commonly reported time to trial fitting was 1–3 months. In addition, health insurance reimbursements for seating were considered part of disease-specific rehabilitation in most cases, and most therapists were more or less satisfied with the current seating procedure. Physiotherapists had the highest degree of reflection of their views (wishes) regarding seating, followed by MDs and their families. In Japan, seating has been regarded as a medical practice since 2017. In the future, we would like to investigate the seating concept for individual therapists in detail.