Physical Therapy Excursion

     During my spring break I had the opportunity to shadow a physical therapist. It wasn't purely for this project however, my dream job is to be a physical therapist and I thought it would be beneficial to trail one. But. seeing as how my topic is sports injuries, it clearly fits well with my experience. When people get hurt, they often need help recovering from the injury, especially the more serious ones. When this happens, they go to a physical therapist for help.
     While on my observation experience at Luther Midlefort I got to see how the PT told the patient to deal with the injury. The first person who came in had torn an ACL and was going through rehab after surgery. They were in their third week of rehab and hadn't been progressing as far as they would have liked. The person shared these frustrations with the therapist, who told him that these things were to be expected. Not every injury is the same, so it is unreasonable to expect the same results for them all. This seemed to ease the patient a little bit. The doctor had some printed out exercises for the patient to take home and do. As he explained them, I got to see a demonstration of each. It was really nice for me to see exactly how they were supposed to be done, and the therapist explained that if they were done incorrectly, it could do more harm than good. I found this to be really interesting. I would really like to include this in my research. The other patients I saw the PT I was shadowing were not victims of sports injuries, rather they had been in car accidents. Due to this fact, I find it inappropriate to include stories of those visits in my research, but they too were helpful to me.
     I found this visit to be extremely beneficial. I had written in my mid-research review that I would like to look more at the treatment and what happens after the injury, as opposed to the injury itself that I focused on in the first half of my project. The most valuable and eye-opening pieces of information that I gained were: A) No injury is the same, and B) If done incorrectly, the rehab could end up doing more harm than good. These two facts will end up in my thesis, because I feel they are extremely important.
(Action-Oriented, Writing)