Joe's OT blog

Last Friday in our class centered around older adults, we had a guest lecturer who talked about the importance of sexual health and aging. She explained the numerous benefits sexual activity can have on the aging adult. Studies have shown that orgasms can relieve pain, reduce stress, improve sleep and boost the immune system. Overall any form of sexual activity can increase cognitive functioning. She then talked about why some older adults participate in a decreased amount of sexual activity and ways we can combat this. Two interventions are listed below: one in a group based setting and one client-based intervention. One intervention that comes to mind is a group intervention for a group of males with erectile dysfunction. This would involve mostly educating the clients on ways to improve sexual health as you get older. As we age we face many physical changes that affect our ability to perform sexually and one of these is erectile dysfunction. As our guest speaker mentioned there a...

Last week in our occupation-centered practice with older adults class, we had a guest lecturer on adaptive driving and community mobility. This lecture was very informative and I learned a lot from the experience. It is hard for us to think about it but driving is a very difficult and important skill that requires many different attributes. When we talk about an adaptive driving program, the focus is on three main purposes: assessing the individual for safety and the potential to drive, evaluate individuals for appropriate adaptive equipment, and train individuals in the use of the equipment and compensatory techniques for driving. When assessing the individual there are two main components: the clinical evaluation and the behind-the-wheel assessment. The clinical evaluation is going to focus on a vision screening, visual perception, cognition, active range of motion, sensation of upper and lower extremities, grip, rules of the road, and insight and awareness. If all these skills pro...

Just the other day in our older adults course, we had a guest lecturer about the value of nutrition in individual's lives. She did a great job conveying her message on the importance of people receiving proper nutrition and ensuring that they are not malnourished. Malnourishment has been a problem for many years in the hospital setting and continues to be increasingly prevalent issue. Our guest speaker stressed the importance of educating our clients on ways to avoid malnourishment and increase well-being. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss two interventions that we as future occupational therapists can do to help our clients increase their quality of life.  As our guest lecturer mentioned there are basically two main ways we can help someone who is not getting proper nutrition. These are exercise and eating protein. To give two main examples I want to first think about an older adult population. This would be a perfect population to have group therapy. The group therapy...

As we start to wind down the end of coursework in my career as an OT student, we were tasked with drawing a glyph self-portrait of a leader.  In drawing the glyph different features represent different characteristics of a leader This is something we did at the very beginning of our schooling as well. When we were finished we were asked to compare and contrast the one we drew just the other day to the one we drew in the first few weeks of school. So here we go: To begin, my characters were relatively similar and almost identical. Both have square heads meaning leadership stems from nurture over nature. I firmly believe that over time we can learn to be a leader just because we mature, we gain skills, and we have the ability to observe and model our actions after other effective leaders. Both have small eyes meaning there is an equal mix of leaders and non-leaders in the field of OT. After reflecting I wish I could go back and change the small eyes to big eyes meaning the majorit...

A couple of weeks ago, as part of our neurological aspects class, we had the opportunity to go watch the Memphis Rolling Grizzlies practice. The Memphis Rolling Grizzlies are part of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association and are made up of players with various injuries that don't allow them to run or jump anymore. Injuries may range from hip replacements to amputations to spinal cord injuries. The Rolling Grizzlies play in division one of the NWBA, the highest division competing at the highest level. I am very grateful that I was able to go watch them, it was a great learning experience for myself and classmates. I have always enjoyed playing basketball and like to think that I am somewhat decent at it. My friends might say otherwise but that is a conversation for another day. Just being around basketball for a lot of my life it was interesting how similar and different it was. I thought it was interesting that they use a functional classification scale assigning players...

In our Neurological Aspects class we just finished up our media project. We were each assigned a recyclable material to be used to create a device to be used in an intervention. We were then assigned a client and given their case and details about their diagnoses. For my project I was assigned aluminum foil. My client was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The progression of her diagnoses has recently caused her to have some problems. She has suffered some falls recently, seen a decrease in her upper extremity range of motion, sensation to touch in her hands have decreased and she reports a numb feeling in her hands at some points throughout the day. She is struggling to do the things she loves. Due to the progression of multiples sclerosis, Alice's doctor has written an order for home health services. As I read the case, the wheels in my head started spinning with ideas. I eventually decided to make what I called the HookNet. It is a device made of aluminum foil in the ...