Blog 2

This is my second time shadowing a PT facility, and this one compared to what I did in the winter has some similarities, but for the most part, they are very different. In the winter, I shadowed in a pediatric setting that specialized in kids with special needs or developmental delays. For this project, it is 95% elderly patients who have mainly just had some type of joint replacement. In this setting, the primary goal is getting the patient to a comfortable place both pain and mobility-wise. Many of them are already below baseline when it comes to mobility, so the goal is to get them back to where they were rather than what the typical baseline would be. When it comes to the exercises that are being performed during the session, it changes patient by patient depending on many things, the biggest one being balance and stability. In elderlies, losing balance is very common, but this makes it hard to do exercises that would benefit their recovery, so being able to adapt and find different variations is key. Also, the sessions are heavily led by what the patient feels comfortable with and what they can tolerate. Something that stood out to me was a patient who came in with a similar injury as me, and the exercises and plan of treatment were all the same, except that the patient because of his age and situation, could not perform many of them, so we had to find ways to adjust but still get the same benefit. In the pediatric setting, a lot of the time was spent adjusting to what the kids wanted as well while making it therapeutic, but it felt a lot more like playing than actual therapy. These two clientele are very different in the sense that the kids do not really understand why they are there and don’t necessarily enjoy it while I have noticed most of the patients now want to be there and get back to their
normal selves.