What do you do? Occupational Therapy! (Part 1)
Hi everybody! Occupational therapy first year second year student here to answer the question, “So, what is occupational therapy exactly?”
Many people in the medical field may have heard the name or have some vague concept about what occupational therapy (commonly abbreviated OT) is, but others may have not, and certainly there are a large number of people not in the medical field who have no idea what this is. In fact, it’s probably easier for me to start by explaining what OT is not:
Occupational therapy is not career counseling. (That’s the name of my blog!) Yes, the independent words seem like synonyms of one another, but they’re totally different things.
Occupational therapy is not physical therapy. A lot of times, they get prescribed together (OT/PT), to the point where medical providers act like “oh-tee-pee-tee” is one long, bizarre word meaning “please exercise this guy”.
Occupational therapy is not just group craft time, nor is it artistic busywork. Many OT providers do choose to use art as a component of their therapy (which I’ll explain more about later), myself included. Sometimes laypeople and even medical providers look at this and don’t think it can have any value because on the outside it looks fun and playful. Because everybody knows that in order for therapy to work, it has to be super boring, and the minute you start to have fun it ceases to be therapeutic!
Okay, so those are probably the most common misconceptions about what occupational therapy is not. So we’re back to our original question, what is occupational therapy? That’s a good question, and in fact, the American Occupational Therapy Association is currently in talks to agree upon a simple definition encompassing exactly what we do, which will be announced at the 100th Birthday of OT happening in 2017.
In the meantime, we’re having to get by with our own simple definitions, and here’s mine:
Occupational therapy is therapy that focuses on an individual’s ability to enjoy life the way they want to as a measure of success.
That means that, for an occupational therapist, the most important measure of whether they are succeeding in providing therapy is whether or not their patient is able to participate in the things they want to do. Right now, if you’re in the medical field (or even if you’re not), you might be scratching your head and saying “uh, isn’t that what every medical provider wants?” And the answer is, yes and no.
So let me break this down a little further.
The reason the name “occupational therapy” confuses people (see: not career counseling) is because in our society, our “occupation” specifically means our job. But in occupational therapy, an occupation is defined as any meaningful activity that a person does to occupy their time. Under this definition, your job is definitely still your occupation, but so is being a parent, going to school, playing with your pet, engaging in your hobbies, participating in leisure activities, and so on.
It encompasses all the roles in your life (employee, parent, sibling, student, child, friend, volunteer). And, here’s the most important part: your occupations are totally different than somebody else’s occupations. You may be the same age, live in the same area, and have the same diagnosis as someone else, but your therapy will be totally different because it’s going to focus on the crucial aspects of what make you, you!
This is not at all to say that other medical professions don’t care about you as a person, or that they don’t know how to adjust their tactics to fit their patient’s personal needs. Not at all! Good medical professionals in every field will have elements of this holistic viewpoint in their practice. But at the end of the day, if a surgeon has a guy open on his operating table, it doesn’t matter whether this guy uses his knee to play basketball, to perform martial arts, or to dance at the grocery store and embarrass his kids; all that matters is that the surgeon needs to replace the knee. (Cue kneeologists correcting me in the comments.)
But when the guy is recovering from surgery and learning how to do things again, his occupational therapist will be the one taking that into consideration.
We’ll look more at how OTs do that in Part 2 of this series!
