Every PT student these days has access to a computer or a laptop. Even if you don’t have your own personal device, there are computer labs and libraries on each and every campus that do.

As a result, you as a PT student would be wise to make sure that you have all sorts of trustworthy, free and overall great physical therapy and health-profession websites you can continually look to and draw upon. That is, of course, if you want to help yourself out with learning and mastering your academic material. Even better, these websites aren’t just helpful while you’re a student; they can continue to serve you well as a graduate who enters clinical practice, should you need them (they’ll continue to come in handy, trust me).

The quick overview of this article

While there are plenty of great websites on the internet for PT students learning all of their mandated curricula, my top five go-to recommendations are as follows:

1. Physiotutors.com
2. Physio-pedia.com
3. Biodigital.com
4. Neuroscience online: An Electronic Textbook for the Neurosciences
5. Orthobullets.com
6. Khanacademy.org

The reasons why I recommend each website will be discussed in further detail below, so be sure to keep reading!

Why I’ve selected these sites

As stated before, there’s plenty of other great sites besides what is in this current list. PT school consists of a few dozen courses, and while there’s helpful websites for each and everyone of them, my top five sites in this article should help in one of two ways:

• Cover content that is needed for multiple courses/a vast amount of PT-specific material

Or

• Cover material that pertains to courses that are often the more academically challenging courses for students

As always, in addition to the sites mentioned in this article, I encourage you to continually track down and bookmark other sites that will be the most helpful for you throughout your time in PT school.
Alright let’s get into it!

Physiotutors.com

Physiotutors.com is a website run by two physiotherapists, Andreas Heck and Kai Sigel. Their mission is to offer high-quality physiotherapy content to students and practitioners across multiple formats. Their content aims to help educate those who wish to be more successful in the classroom and the clinic, and these guys do a really good job at that.

The quality of content that these two gentlemen put out is incredibly high. When studying for my board exams, I spent plenty of time on their YouTube channel, where they have a massive section covering orthopaedic tests, including the sensitivity and specificity of each test. The latter part was key for me. You don’t need to know specificity and sensitivity of special tests for the board exam, but it’s great to know for clinical practice.

In addition to great videos and information on orthopaedic special tests, they also have plenty of content on topics such as screening, clinical reasoning, exercise and much more.

Be sure to check these guys out! Spend plenty of time on both their website as well as their YouTube channel. They very well likely have information on each one that you may be struggling with or for which you need a deeper understanding.

Physio-pedia.com

The mission of physio-pedia.com is to improve global health through universal access to physiotherapy knowledge. As per their website, they are a not-for-profit organization that advocates for the physiotherapy profession while helping those in need of physiotherapy knowledge.

Physio-pedia has a presentation section on their website that has a lot of great material covering topics that are taught throughout PT school. The presentations are free and presented by physical therapists with designated specialties within the profession. It can be a powerful adjunct for solidifying your knowledge on certain topics or even reviewing concepts that are covered in PT courses throughout school.

They do have a sort of off-shoot section of their site called Physioplus, where you can sign up and take a bunch of different online courses and access all sorts of educational content, but it does however require a membership (with fee). It’s more for those who wish to continually learn more and stay up to date with the profession. It is not meant to be a supplement to helping students pass their board exams. Therefore, unless you have some extra money to burn, I would just stick with the presentation section of the physio-pedia website.

Biodigital.com
 (formally biodigitalhuman.com)

While some students may have iPads, MacBooks or other devices that can run amazing anatomical three-dimensional modelling software such as 3D4’s Complete Anatomy or Essential Anatomy 5, not every student will. And even for some students who do, paying for an anatomy app may not be preferred or even feasible if they are on a rather tight budget (as most PT students tend to be).

Enter biodigital.com. Biodigital is a free, three-dimensional human visualization platform for anatomy and disease.

While a dedicated anatomy textbook can be a great resource to have, sometimes it’s nice to not have to lug one around, or nice to have a three-dimensional model to look at. The human body is a three-dimensional structure after all, and so trying to learn about three-dimensional structures on two-dimensional sheets of paper can be a bit limiting at times.

Just start by creating a free account (yes, it’s legitimately 100% free), and then log in. From there, select the “explore” tab and you’ll have a drop down feature pop up for every system within the body along with whole-body anatomical models.

From there, you’re free to select whichever system you’d like and start learning whatever you feel you need to. With the ability to zoom, rotate, fade, isolate and pull up specific information on practically any structure within the body, you’ll be on your way to a better understanding of the human body and thus, better grades and performance in PT school.

Neuroscience online

I have a separate blog post dedicated as to how amazing of a free resource this is, so if you want to read a post with more elaboration as to what this free textbook covers, be sure to check out my article The Best Free Resource for Your Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience Courses in PT School.

As you may already know by now (or will perhaps find out at some point), neuroanatomy/neuroscience in PT school can be notoriously challenging for PT students. If you want to know as to why, check out my article What are the Hardest Courses for Students in PT School?

Thankfully, this free online textbook, developed by the University of Texas’ Health & Science Center at Houston can greatly alleviate the challenge. With every chapter written by a PhD author in their respective topic, you get great information along with animations to help illustrate neurological processes & pathways that happen within the body for each topic you’re covering.

Be sure to bookmark this site, especially when you’re going through neuro. It’s an incredibly helpful, free resource that you’ll be able to draw upon again and again.

Orthobullets.com

During your time in school, you will spend a decent amount of time in Orthopaedic and Orthopaedic-based courses. Some institutions, such as the one I attended offered a post-masters certificate in orthopaedics in conjunction to graduating with the DPT degree (which I graduated with), meaning you can spend a decent amount of your schooling focusing on even more orthopaedics-based courses.

For some, orthopaedics is our first love, but for others, it’s a pure grind to get through. Regardless of which category you fall into, having orthobullets.com as a resource in your back pocket can only serve to assist you throughout your time in PT school.

While the website itself is more intended for medical students, residents, surgeons and other ortho-based medical professionals, no doubt can PT students benefit from this site. Orthopaedics can prove to be the bane of one’s existence for some PT students, and since orthopaedics courses comprise a nice chunk of PT school, having a solid, trustworthy and thorough orthopaedic website to reference can really help.

The handiest portion of this website will likely be found under the “topics” portion of the site. Once you click on it, you’re given a drop-down list of areas such as:

• Spine
• Shoulder & elbow
• Knee & sports
• Hand
• Foot & ankle
• Pathology
• Anatomy
  
• And more!

Once you click on a respective section, you’ll be taken to a list or table that consists of “high yield topics” as they call them. Click on one of those high-yield topics and you’ll get a breakdown of everything you as a physio student are likely to need to know regarding the topic. The list will cover everything from epidemiology to risk factors, anatomy that is involved, medical imaging of the injury, rehabilitation and much more.

What makes this such a powerful platform for PT students in their orthopaedics courses is that the vast majority of content is found on the orthobullets website.

The video section of Orthobullets is also extremely helpful for PT students

In addition to the “topics” section of the website, there is also a video section that provides video presentations on all aspects of orthopaedic issues, pathologies and injuries. Many of these videos are about surgical techniques or the surgical world in general, but not all of them. There are plenty of videos that present more on the nature of an injury or variations that may be seen.

As well, there is a video section dedicated to anatomy that can also serve to really help students who wish to continually enhance their knowledge on anatomy and other aspects pertaining to this realm. There are also video sections on pathology which can also be extremely beneficial for students looking to further enhance their knowledge of pathological processes that occur within the realm of orthopaedic-based issues.

Bottom line: Orthobullets is definitely a site you’ll want to bookmark, especially when it comes time to taking your orthopaedic courses. Staying on top of your material and understanding it to broader and deeper depths is quite doable with a website such as this one.

Khanacademy.org

Khanacademy.org is likely the most well-known website within this particular list, and for good reason. The site has been around since 2008 and has since grown into a massive, free online web-based learning platform.

While it’s not a website that’s specific to physical therapy, it covers extensive amounts of video tutorials and practice problems for science and healthcare topics that are required by physical therapy students to know. This includes all necessary prerequisite coursework that physical therapy students within the US must take before entering into PT school.

As well, there are dedicated sections on the website pertaining to physiology, medicine, and much, much more. The sections are always laid out in clear ways and each topic presented is done so by a qualified professional.

You can use the site for free, or can create an account if you’d like to do so. The benefit of creating an account is that you are able to then track your progress towards which videos you’ve watched, which topics you’ve covered, and much more. This can come in quite handy since there is an absolute plethora of content within this great resource.

Concluding remarks

Even if you’re a PT student without your own personal laptop or computer, you still have access to computers on your institution’s campus. This means that you have access to these free websites discussed within this article.

Money is usually tight for PT students, so knowing of and having access to helpful resources that won’t cost a single penny can go a long way, especially for an academic program that can present a seemingly overwhelming amount of material to many students.

There are plenty of additional free, helpful websites for PT students than are mentioned within this article, so it is always worth the student’s time to explore other websites and resources that can aid in making life in-school and out of school more manageable. The key is to find the ones that work best for you, and use them as much as possible based on your needs.

Grind hard. You got this.