11/16/2018 0 Comments Reflective Journal #12This week, I was able to design a rehab day with a football player who is six months post-op from his ACL reconstruction surgery. He was cleared to start cutting this week, but was still struggling with feeling unstable on his affected leg. We began rehab with a warm up on the stationary bike, and then we took out the ladder. I wanted to get his heart rate elevated and perform movements that would prepare him for the cutting movements he would be performing later in the rehab. Additionally, I wanted to take advantage of this time to get him moving while also making him think about his movements. I had him start by doing four sets of each exercise starting with two feet in each block for speed. Then we moved into lateral movements for four sets, and then we started doing cutting like movements. He performed 4 sets of ickey, then we moved onto doing two ickey steps forward then one backward. He seemed to have considerable trouble with these exercise, not because of the physicality of it, but because of the mental portion of the exercise. I would like to see exercises like that incorporated into his rehab more often to help prepare him mentally for coming back to play. We ended the ladder with a backwards ickey.
After the ladder, I wanted to work on glute activation before moving into running. I had him perform 2 down and back duck walk with two black mini bands. He has done this often, but this time I asked him to walk forward on the way down, and then walk backwards on the way back. I wanted to make sure that it was targeting different parts of the glutes with each movement. He gave me positive feedback that it was challenging and that he felt it in a different place than just when moving forward. After that, we moved our session to outside. He explained that he had trouble with adding additional, non-necessary movements when he was cutting while running, so we tried to focus on correct mechanics for the majority of the rest of the session. We started with slow running and cutting to ensure that he felt comfortable, then increased the speed. He consistently performed much better as the speed increased, which I believed allowed him to stop overthinking so much about what he was doing and just performed. Overall, I think it was a successful rehab where he was challenged without overdoing it. I felt more confident pushing him a little harder than I usually feel comfortable with, so I'm learning the correct level of how much to push someone and when to lay off.
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11/9/2018 0 Comments Reflective Journal #11The clinical goal that I have focused on the most is my first goal: I will practice my use of therapeutic modalities by reviewing parameters weekly with my preceptor. Therapeutic modalities is one of the most difficult portion of being in the clinic for me, right behind designing creative rehabs. I believe that it is difficult for me to remember many of the modalities and their parameters, especially for ultrasound, because it is an area that I am not very interested in. It is easy for me to remember general medicine protocols, emergency care, and diagnoses because those are things that I am very interested in. I have found a trend in my practice where I have a much more difficult time being excited about and remembering areas of practice that don’t easily keep my attention. Additionally, I think this area is a challenge for me because in the back of my mind, I know I will not be using modalities for very much longer in my career. When I travel to China for athletic training, I will not be given the same resources that we have in America, and I will have no choice but to be creative in my treatments. Also, when if or when I get the opportunity to go to PA school, I will not have to apply these treatments very often if at all.
However, after bringing this up to Cole and explaining my struggles with ultrasound and e-stim, he was been very intentional about reviewing parameters with me. He offered me a sheet that helped him in his graduate research on the effectiveness of ultrasound which has been very beneficial to me during treatments. Additionally, he allows me to set up multiple ultrasound treatments, each needing different parameters so that I am exposed to multiple different scenarios in which a modality can be used. I think that this practice and being “forced” to recall the information on a weekly basis has helped me so much this semester. I have also never been much of a fan of using modalities because of the results I have received on myself and the reports I have heard from other athletes, but my preceptors have done a great job at explaining what each modality treatment was for and why it works well for that situation. It has also been really helpful that they understand that I have a hard time remembering and that I would ultimately prefer a different treatment type, but still encouraging to continue to learn about the modalities that I struggle with while also discussing different treatment options with me. 11/4/2018 0 Comments Reflective Journal #10My favorite part of clinical experience this fall has definitely been my rotation with Dr. Handy. Over the course of the athletic training program and its classes, I have found that I am particularly interested in the general medicine portion of what we do. For me, gen med is like a big puzzle - I ask questions to get all of the pieces, and then when I have all the pieces of the puzzle then I can figure out what the puzzle actually makes. I don’t get as much experience with general medicine in the athletic training program, so it was very exciting to me to be able to get 20 hours full of clinical experience that was flooded with general medicine.
This is especially exciting and meaningful to me because it gives me a glimpse into my future. Sometimes I struggle with spending so much time in the athletic training clinic because I sometimes spend whole days doing things I’m not AS passionate about, even though I still take pride in what I do there. However, spending hours upon hours and staying late in the clinic with Dr. Handy was never a struggle for me. I was constantly wondering what was going to be in the next room, writing down different medications and what they do, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together for each individual patient, and even at one point, getting moved to tears by a patient suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. I loved that Dr. Handy allowed me to participate in auscultation in most of his patients, and he always asked me what I heard which allowed me to try to work through all the different sounds and the knowledge that I had to put the heart sounds together with the conditions that I knew. It seems like such a small aspect of the whole evaluation, but it was so exciting for me. Looking back on all of my rotations, they have helped me navigate where my passions are and where they do not. I loved being in the emergency room and experiencing the energy that constantly was flowing during that rotation, especially when running down the halls when the nurse I was shadowing was called for a code blue. I being in family practice with Dr. Handy and experiencing something different in each room that I walked into. But on the other hand, I did not at all enjoy my rotation in the wound care clinic, not because it wasn’t interesting, but because I couldn’t stomach it. Additionally, I thought I was going to fall in love with the PT clinic, but I was surprised when I didn’t have the spark I thought I would have for it. All of these experiences have continually affirmed me that I am headed in the right direction for my future career. |
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April 2019
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