Joe's OT blog

I just finished reading the New York Times Bestseller  Inside the O' Briens  by Lisa Genova. This book takes us inside the lives of Joe O' Brien, his wife Rosie, and his four kids (JJ, Meghan, Katie, and Patrick). Joe has just been diagnosed with Huntington's disease. The book highlights the devastating emotional effects the disease causes. One thing I think the book did a great job of was showing us how much the diagnoses affected those around Joe, really going into depth about how the possibility of getting the disease affected each one of his kids. The book was very deep and so sad at some parts it was hard to read, but unfortunately that is the ultimate reality of what this terrible disease does. As we have been learning about Huntington's disease in class,  Inside the O' Briens  really deepened my understanding of what it is, what the symptoms and prognosis are and how important a good social support system is. As part of class we did an occupational profile ...

I just finished listening to episode 22 of the Glass Half Full podcast. Occupational therapists Natalie Barnes and Jessica Kersey do a great job in these podcasts and are great promoters of the field. The goal of their podcast is to promote occupational therapy by delivering a consistent message demonstrating how important occupation is to someone's livelihood. They achieve this by always looking at the glass half full. In this particular episode, number 22, Natalie and Jessica bring on special guest Jeff Loveland. Jeff is an occupational therapist who's dad suffered from dementia. It was interesting hearing Jeff talk and get his perspective about all the things he and his brother had to go through being the primary care givers to his dad. Jeff notes that one of the first things to go is the driver's license due to motor issues. From here the everyday problems just continue to trickle down and care becomes hard. One of the hardest decisions to be made is when to make that...

During the fall many Americans spend their Saturdays and Sundays in front of the big screen watching football. This includes myself, my family, and my friends. Every time we watch there is a moment when we will say "wow that was a brutal, I don't know how he's still in the game." I just watched Chris Nowinski's ted talk called "Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussion and CTE" and I think this wow moment we have relates back to his research. Being such a big football fan, this research although frightening has always been interesting to me.  A little background information, Chris was a football player for Harvard University. After his playing career he joined the WWE, entertainment wrestling, where he suffered a concussion. He retired from the WWE due to his constant headaches, sleep deprivation and depression, all symptoms of post-concussion syndrome. Due to his injury he started doing research and found that it went way deeper than c...

The Social Participation Frame of Reference theorizes how important emotion is to motivate and engage children in social participation. Children learn from others and so their relationship with their parents is going to provide the foundation for their emotional development. This frame of reference understands that children with disabilities can have a decreased ability to understand emotions, making it harder for them to engage in social activities. It is important due to this decreased ability, that the parents and children understand how important it is to engage in social participation. This frame of reference looks at seven different factors influencing social functioning and these include, temperament, adaptation, emotional regulation, family habits and routines, environmental supports, social participation in school, environment for peer interaction and peer interaction. In order to improve these factors, interventions are going to include both children and caregivers/peers doin...

Today in our foundations class we covered the concepts of health literacy, promotion and prevention. One thing I found very interesting was this concept of navigators. From my understanding this concept is going to involve non-profit environments where a client, most likely someone who struggles financially will come to the food pantry looking to receive food. In order to receive the essentials, this client is required to receive other services with one being an occupational therapy evaluation to assess ways to help the client to function independently. This pushes occupational therapists to be more active in the community and to educate individuals on occupational therapy services. One other concept I learned today was on health literacy. Health literacy by the book is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health info and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. This concept really relates back to the client-centered ...