My OT Adventure

     For this assignment, I chose to look further into the neurological condition of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a specific type of dementia. This disease is caused by plaques and tangles in the brain which result as a progressive loss of memory. Symptoms of this disease or the “5 A’s” include anomia, amnesia, apraxia, agnosia, and aphasia. Additionally, Alzheimer’s disease can affect other areas of an individual’s life such as motor skills, balance, ADLs, iADLs, and much more.     Although this disease is seen by most as a devastation, there can be some joy found within it. I say this after watching a very inspirational and informative Ted Talk video “Finding joy in an Alzheimer’s reality” by Beth Fauth who spoke about Alzheimer’s disease and how we have the power to see the good. She spoke about the influence a caregiver, nurse, therapist, or anyone else who comes in contact with someone who has AD has on their life. For example, she conducted a study that ...

      Throughout this course, we have learned about various neurological conditions and the symptoms, stages, incidence/prevalence, occupational therapy’s role, and much more. Occupational therapist’s play a large role in each individual case and this can be seen through various techniques such as education, strategies, and occupation based activities. It was interesting to learn about this in our Neurological Aspects of Occupational Performance class, however, it is very different when you are actually putting into practice. Although each case study may not have been one of our real clients, through this project we were able to use creativity and practice creating an innovation that is client-centered and an occupation-based activity.           For me, the most meaningful and significant thing that I learned from this project is what you can do with just a little. Each of us were assigned random household items and we each turned them into ...

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is an upper and lower motor neuron disease that affects almost all voluntary muscles in the body. This can include upper and lower extremities, speech, breathing, walking impairments, etc. ALS is a progressive and fatal, neurodegenerative disease that a cure has yet to be developed for but much research is being done to hopefully find a cure in the near future. To further my learning about this disease I chose to look into the specific life of someone with ALS by watching the movie “The Theory of Everything.” This movie is about the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, and his life before his diagnosis of ALS, his diagnosis, and his life as the disease progressed. I chose to watch this movie for a lot of reasons but the main one being how clearly it depicted not only the problems he had in his daily life but what he was still able to accomplish even though he faced many struggles. Hawking’s first sym...

For this assignment, I chose to research a spinal cord injury (SCI). This can be caused by many different issues whether it be due to a trauma, infection, congenital problems, or compression and can be classified as complete or incomplete. A complete spinal cord injury is more severe than incomplete but every SCI is different depending on where the injury/lesion occurs and the deficits usually occur below this. For example, if someone were to have a lesion on the lower spinal cord, the deficits or paralysis may be limited   to the lower extremities.   In order to examine a SCI case more closely, I chose to watch the movie, “Me Before You.” This movie is about a wealthy man, Will, who is hit by a motorcycle and is left almost completely paralyzed. A woman, Lou, becomes his caretaker. I chose to watch this movie not only because it is very entertaining (and quite sad), you are also able to learn a lot about his injury while following along a love story. Although a lot of t...