Physical Therapy
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99 free Physical Therapy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free physical therapy trivia questions with answers. This physical therapy quiz was built for the people who actually work in the field: PTs, PTAs, students and the office managers roped into running a game for National Physical Therapy Month. It covers the profession's history (the Swedish fencing master who started it, the four British nurses who founded a society in 1894, the World War I 'reconstruction aides', the Australian bush nurse whose polio methods rewrote rehabilitation) and the modern profession, from DPT programs and board specialties to telerehabilitation. The clinical questions stay light and fun rather than exam-grade: what a goniometer measures, why the RICE acronym's own inventor turned against it, how much of the gait cycle is stance phase, which knee test is the most sensitive for an ACL tear. About a third are easy enough for a patient in the waiting room; a handful will make an experienced clinician pause. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and the citation sits under each explanation, so you can settle the break-room debate on the spot.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Greeks are often credited as the first practitioners of physical therapy?
Hippocrates and Galen
Hippocrates and Galen both treated patients with their hands: Hippocrates wrote that a physician must be skilled in rubbing, and Galen began as physician to the gladiators of Pergamon.
Q 02In which country did Per Henrik Ling found the 1813 gymnastics institute seen as the origin of physical therapy?
Sweden
Sweden. After several failed appeals to the government, Ling won its backing in 1813 for the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm, which trained instructors in his system of exercise as medicine.
Q 03Per Henrik Ling, whose gymnastics gave rise to physical therapy, was hired by Lund University in 1805 to teach which sport?
Fencing
Fencing. Ling took it up on his travels abroad, found that daily exercise restored his own failing health, and so began designing exercises to do the same for other people.
Q 04Which global sporting event grew from a 1948 archery contest for wheelchair-using war veterans at Stoke Mandeville Hospital?
The Paralympic Games
The Paralympic Games began as rehabilitation: Dr Ludwig Guttmann made sport part of treatment at his spinal injuries unit, and timed his 16-archer contest for the very day the 1948 Olympics opened.
Q 05The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy was founded in 1894 by four members of which profession?
Nurses
Nurses founded it as the Society of Trained Masseuses, to protect their trade after press stories warned of massage being offered as a cover for other services; a royal charter followed in 1920.
Q 06The rotator cuff, a group of four muscles that physical therapists often rehabilitate, holds which joint together?
The shoulder
The shoulder. Its socket is so shallow that the four cuff muscles, not the bones, keep the ball of the upper arm in place, which is why a tear can make even combing your hair painful.
Q 07The University of Otago opened an early school of physiotherapy in 1913, in which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand. The Dunedin school began life inside Otago's medical school as the School of Massage, and its first students left with a university Certificate in Massage rather than a physiotherapy degree.
Q 08Which Portland, Oregon institution trained 'reconstruction aides', forerunners of physical therapists, for the US Army in 1918?
Reed College
Reed College ran one of the emergency wartime courses for the Army's new reconstruction division, whose aides went on to work in military hospitals at home and overseas as civilians.
Q 09The first US school of physical therapy was established during World War I at which army medical centre?
Walter Reed
Walter Reed, the Army hospital in Washington, D.C., needed staff trained to get wounded soldiers moving again, and from 1918 the recruits who did that work were known as 'reconstruction aides'.
Q 10Which word completed the APTA's original 1921 name, 'the American ___ Physical Therapeutic Association'?
Women's
Women's. A year later the name became the American Physiotherapy Association so that qualified men could join, and the first two were admitted in 1923.
Q 11Who was the first president of what became the American Physical Therapy Association?
Mary McMillan
Mary McMillan, an American who trained in England, came back in wartime to become the Army's head reconstruction aide in 1918, and the aides she led went on to form the association.
Q 12Which future US president bought a run-down Georgia spa in the 1920s and turned it into a hydrotherapy centre?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt, diagnosed with polio in 1921, spent much of his fortune on Warm Springs after hearing what its waters could do, and the foundation he set up there led to the March of Dimes.
Q 13Sister Elizabeth Kenny, whose polio methods shaped modern physical therapy, came from which country?
Q 21A physiatrist, a title easily confused with physical therapist, is what kind of professional?
A medical doctor
A medical doctor. Physiatrists specialise in physical medicine and rehabilitation and lead the rehab team, ordering tests and giving injections, while physical therapists deliver the exercise and hands-on treatment.
Q 22What is 'direct access' in physical therapy?
Seeing a PT without a physician referral
Seeing a PT without a physician referral was legal in some form in all 50 US states by 2025, although in a number of them rules still limit how far treatment can go before a referral arrives.
Q 23Men are most often referred for pelvic floor muscle training after surgery on which organ?
Australia
Australia. Self-taught and working in rural Queensland, Kenny saw her polio methods ridiculed by doctors at home, so in 1940 she took them to the United States, where they won wide acceptance.
Q 14What did Sister Kenny apply to polio patients' limbs before moving them, defying medical consensus?
Hot compresses
Hot compresses were meant to ease what Kenny called 'spasm'; she then worked the very limbs that doctors of the day kept still in splints, braces and plaster.
Q 15The Sister Kenny Institute, now Courage Kenny Rehabilitation, opened in 1942 in which US city?
Minneapolis
Minneapolis gave Kenny her American start: when most doctors dismissed her ideas in 1940, doctors in the city backed her, and the institute followed two years later.
Q 16The Epley manoeuvre, a series of head movements that therapists use to treat vertigo, shifts loose crystals in which organ?
The inner ear
The inner ear. Tiny calcium crystals can break free and drift into its fluid-filled balance canals, sending false signals of movement, and the head positions use gravity to roll them back out.
Q 17The World Confederation for Physical Therapy, founded in 1951, has its head office in which city?
London
London. Britain's Chartered Society of Physiotherapy organised the confederation's first congress there in 1953, and the two bodies now share an office building in the city.
Q 18Lateral epicondylitis, an overuse injury that physical therapists often treat, is better known by which sporting nickname?
Tennis elbow
Tennis elbow. Most people who get it never pick up a racquet: painters, plumbers, cooks and butchers strain the same forearm tendons through repeated gripping and twisting.
Q 19Since 2016, US entry-level physical therapist programs have awarded what level of degree?
A doctorate
A doctorate, the Doctor of Physical Therapy, replaced the master's degree, which US schools no longer offer, so therapists who qualified under the old system can take a 'transitional' DPT to match newer colleagues.
Q 20Which rehab product, developed by chiropractor Kenzo Kase in the 1970s, took off after athletes wore it at the 2008 Olympics?
Kinesiology tape
Kinesiology tape was donated to athletes at the Beijing Games and its popularity soared, yet reviews of the research still find the evidence that it works mixed at best.
The prostate
The prostate. Surgery on it can leave men leaking urine, and the remedy is the same squeeze-and-hold exercise that gynaecologist Arnold Kegel described for women in 1948.
Q 24Hippotherapy, used by some physical therapists to improve balance and posture, harnesses the movement of which animal?
A horse
A horse: the name comes from the Greek hippos. Its rhythmic, three-dimensional walk shifts the rider's body with every step, which therapists use to work on posture, balance and coordination.
Q 25What instrument does a physical therapist typically use to measure a joint's range of motion in degrees?
A goniometer
A goniometer, in its usual form a two-armed protractor held against the joint, gives the angle in degrees, and repeating the reading over the weeks shows whether rehabilitation is working.
Q 26In physical therapy, what is 'passive range of motion'?
Movement produced by the therapist with no patient effort
Movement produced by the therapist with no patient effort is compared with what the patient manages alone: a truly stiff joint is limited both ways, even in someone else's hands.
Q 27Which phase of the walking gait cycle disappears completely once a person breaks into a run?
Double support
Double support, the moment in each step when both feet are on the ground, is what makes a walk a walk; in a run it gives way to a flight phase with neither foot down.
Q 28Which injury acronym did Dr Gabe Mirkin coin in 1978, then partly disown decades later as likely to delay healing?
RICE
RICE: rest, ice, compression, elevation. Mirkin later withdrew the advice on ice and complete rest, saying they may delay healing because inflammation is part of how tissue repairs itself.
Q 29In the updated injury protocol POLICE, what does the 'OL' stand for?
Optimal Loading
Optimal Loading took the place of 'Rest' when three sports medicine researchers proposed POLICE, arguing that carefully graded early movement speeds recovery while long rest holds it back.
Q 30What does the acronym TENS stand for in physical therapy?
Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation
Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation sends mild pulses through pads on the skin, a modern take on an old idea: the Roman physician Scribonius Largus described easing pain with a live electric fish.