Empathy and Perspective

     Last week in our Foundations of Occupational Therapy class, we watched a video where the audience is taken through a hospital and shown different scenarios, and we are given a little slice of each person's life to remind us that everyone is going through struggles that we might not see. One example was a man standing by his hospital bed in a gown, and text shows up on the screen telling you that his daughter's wedding is that weekend and he is trying to be out of the hospital to be at the wedding. Another shows a man in business attire walking down a hallway looking "normal" and "healthy," but the text tells us that he is finishing up cancer treatment. A nurse is shown treating a patient, and the text lets us know that she is at the end of a 12 hour shift. The video shows the perspective of many employees, patients, and visitors at the hospital.
     This video reminded me to not just take everything I see at face value, but to remember that everyone is going through something. I think this video can be applied professionally, to remind us as future practitioners to keep in mind what our clients are going through. We can also apply the video to our personal lives, with friends and family as well as strangers.
     After watching this video, I am encouraged to be kind to others, both those I know and those I don't know. We all need to be conscious of what other people are going through, even (especially) when they are being mean or rude. Although we might automatically want to be rude back to the other person, we should consider what else might be going on in their life that might be influencing their attitude.

Learning About Nature-Based Therapy

     For our Foundations class before spring break, our professor made the wonderful decision to change one of our classes to an online "choose your own adventure," so we had more time to study for our final exam in Gross Anatomy. For the choose your own adventure aspect of the assignments, we got to pick a podcast to listen to. At first, I was going to listen to a podcast about occupational therapy and diabetes management, since I am a type one diabetic and I thought it would be interesting to listen to something relevant to me. But, within about 30 seconds, the speakers said that they would be focusing on type two diabetes, and I immediately lost interest and decided to listen to something else. That might be a little selfish, but I knew if it wasn't something I was interested in, I wouldn't pay attention. So I decided to listened to the podcast on nature-based therapy, which was much more interesting to me.

     The basis of nature-based therapy is using nature and being outdoors to help with therapy, or to be the actual therapy. While the podcast mostly talked about using nature-based therapy with children, it could likely also be used with older patients. One example of using nature-based therapy that one of the OTs gave was working with a child with sensory processing disorder in an environment with water to give them different types of stimulation than what they would experience inside. Some different settings an OT using nature-based therapy could work in are the beach, the woods, or a creek. A concern that some parents have with this type of therapy is that it may be dangerous for their child, but the OT argued that there can be just as many dangers inside, and that the benefits of bringing kids outside often outweigh the dangers. OTs working with this type of therapy would still use assessments to determine if the therapy is working for clients, the therapy would just be carried out outside. Nature-based therapy is not something I had heard of before, but now that I know about it, it makes a lot of sense and can easily be applied to client-centered practice.