Pre-Final Post

Warning: This post lacks a focus...

In my procrastination of studying/cramming I happened upon the EIM blog and there was a great quote I wanted to share (it perfectly expressed a few feelings I had in my head). These guys are doing such a great job and I wish them all the success in their endeavors cause it means so many great things for so many patients.

We believe that physical therapists are the heretofore unrecognized solution to many of our health care system's woes when it comes to managing musculoskeletal conditions. We are about 2-3% of the health care dollar and dwindling due to other things getting bigger. Despite what people think about our growing profession, we are actually shrinking relatively speaking compared to overall medical growth.

In other news, I swam 100 laps freestyle today, with only two breaks to adjust my goggles. My technique's and endurance are getting better every time I go out there.

So what of this final and class I have been taking? In addition to valuable manual techniques that we were taught, the ultimate goal of the class is to help us improve our clinical decision making abilities. In parallel to what will happen to us very soon, we are given a patient with a history and we have to rule out certain conditions, make sure they are appropriate for PT (within our scope of practice), come up with our own initial diagnosis, explain some treatments for it, and give a prognosis. I am grateful for classes like this as they are the meat and potatoes of what I want to be doing as a PT.
Furthermore, recently I have had a good deal of time to be reflective and would like to say how grateful I am for the gifts I have in my life and that we as humans have. Obviously some have it worse than others but it is necessary to be thankful for what we do have. And I also want to say "thank you" to anyone who is a good parent. From my short time babysitting my sister's kids I love them, but could not imagine doing that 24/7 and holding all the responsibilities that come with it. I am sure I will get that chance soon enough and I will rise to the occasion but it is such an amazing feat. So this is my unofficial tribute to the parents out there.