So, what's OT?

At cocktail grad school parties, there is a common conversation starter.

Person 1: Hi. I'm Cumulonimbus. (For the record, I have never met anyone named cumulonimbus, but it'd be sweet if I had! You get the point, though).
Joyce: Hi, I'm Joyce.
Person 1: What are you studying?
Joyce: Occupational therapy.

Invariably, unalterably a conversation about what OT is follows. I don't blame people. I didn't know either, until I randomly punched it into Google and found a job description with my name on it. I generally take it as an opportunity to share a sentence or two, but sometimes I wonder if people actually know what it is. So here it is:

Occupations therapy helps people do the things that they want or need to do in everyday life. This is far-reaching. For a person who had a stroke, it could be helping them learn to dress themselves or cook with only one fully functioning arm. For a dad with a spinal cord injury, we might take into account which muscles are still being innervated by his nerves, and modify the pieces of games that he plays with his daughter (e.g. add velcro, magnets, loops). For someone with a mental health diagnosis, we may help them learn how to manage medications, grocery shop, or budget.

We can also make hand splints that allow the person to bend their fingers but help with straightening them. We can conduct wheelchair evaluations for a specialized or custom chair that suits the persons environments and things that they want to do (e.g. get back to work on the farm). A last key component is that we look at the environment and see how we can enable people to do what they want or need to do through that. For example, simply by putting large, colored stickers on the start and stop buttons or certain temperatures on an oven, we can allow someone with low vision to continue to cook by creating that high contrast. There are many areas of specialty, which include traumatic brain injury, hand injury, low vision, pediatric physical rehab, pediatric spectrum diagnoses...the list goes on and on. 

In general, I love OT because it fosters creativity, relies on knowledge, is individualized (everyone has different goals), and is motivating because OT directly relates to daily life. But, learning how to successfully do what you want to do isn't just an end; it's also the means to the end. We do a lot of task-analysis. Instead of giving people sheets of exercises, we find activities that they are really motivated to do which work those same muscles, and use that in order to improve strength and function. We may modify the activity to make it easier to start, and then make it progressively harder.

I am always careful to say that my flowery praise is no mean to overshadow PT, which I absolutely, wholeheartedly support and appreciate. We both have very different and very important roles in the health care continuum. Just, for me career-wise, being a PT would have been a way less optimal fit.

Of course, I don't say all this at a party, but I did want to make sure that family and friends had an idea of what OT is all about.