Survey Tiiiiime

Hey guys! As promised, I have more pictures of your favorite dog, Bruin :-). I know you guys have been waiting for these all week so hopefully they can add that spark to what I hope is an already great day ('cause it always works for me, just saying). So without further ado, here you go…… CAUTION: THE FOLLOWING PICTURES DISPLAY EXCEEDING LEVELS OF CUTENESS

Now that that’s out of our system, let’s get down to the juicy stuff: what exactly happened this week. Well, for starters, we got ANOTHER new student that’ll be working with us. And as you can probably predict with this information, we had ANOTHER student leave us as well. It’s kinda been the trend for the past couple weeks. I’m sorry if there’s any confusion about this; I promise there will be more consistency as we delve deeper into the project. But anyways, the new student who’ll be joining us is….. *drum roll*…. Wendy! No, not the Wendy from the iconic fast food chain. Instead, this Wendy is on her final clinical rotation and will be with us at Synergy for the next 11 weeks. But wait, Ameya… what exactly IS a clinical rotation? Well, now that you ask, a clinical rotation is an opportunity for students to apply their knowledge from the classroom to real life medical situations while also helping them gauge what residencies are right for them. Remember Joe, Lori, Jordan, and Nicole from prior weeks’ blog posts? Well, they were all on the tail end of their own clinical rotations. And now, we have someone else who is also on the tail end of hers. Even though I just introduced her to you guys last week, Kirsten’s clinical rotation is actually only two weeks as she now heads back home to continue PT school. It was really nice working with her and understanding yet another perspective on how therapists approach and carry out their work. But, as I mentioned earlier, we also have a new shipmate on board in Wendy. And the thing about Wendy is that she always seems to prioritize the patients and their needs, allowing them to feel the utmost comfort in what is already a very welcoming atmosphere. In all, good luck to Kirsten and welcome aboard Wendy!

I also need to tell you guys about a very interesting hand exercise Vincent had me try out this week. It’s called the “rice bucket exercise.” I know that may not be very self-explanatory, but let me explain. In this exercise, patients are seated in a chair and before them is a giant bucket filled all the way to the top with dry grains of rice. The objective of the patients is to perform a series of wrist maneuvers in order to stimulate the wrist and forearm muscles while they dig as far as they possibly can into the rice bucket. The maneuvers include wrist abduction, adduction, and rotation (both clockwise and counterclockwise). The legend has it that out of everyone who has performed this exercise, only three have made it to the bottom of the bucket. Now, when I tried it, I thought I touched something that felt like the bottom, but I could just be tooting my own horn. Let's just say I made it for good measure ;-). Anyways, below is the setup for the rice bucket exercise. Trust me, it’s way harder than it looks!

And finally, last week I mentioned I would talk with Vincent about expanding my research and actually implementing it within the clinic. From there, I decided to include some surveys which would analyze patient compliance and connect it with any improvement (recovery-wise). The ultimate goal is to establish some sort of correlation between compliance and improvement. Now, I have to say, it was a really interesting experience as it allowed me to get even closer with some of the patients as I appreciated some of their honesty. One patient even jokingly said to me, “I have to tell you something that may skew your data… I’m not a very compliant patient.” And after that, we just laughed it off and I proceeded with the next questions. For some of the patients who displayed non-compliance, I found it interesting that when asked how important they felt the recommended treatment regimens they are given to exercise at home are (in terms of affecting their recovery, of course), they would often respond with an answer of “10” (on a 0-10 scale where 0 refers to complete insignificance and 10 refers to absolute significance). However, when later asked if they could honestly grade their compliance, they would sometimes respond with a “5” or a “6” (also on a 0-10 scale where 0 means they don’t do them at all and 10 means they do them no matter what). Therefore, this shows how despite the fact that many patients may value the treatment exercises they are asked to perform at home, there are still some who don’t exactly illustrate the same passion when it comes to actually doing them. And this can be said for a variety of reasons such as, the degree of difficulty of the exercise or possibly some personal matters that may occupy their time rather than stretching or doing something else to stay compliant. If you want to check out the survey and basically what I asked each of the patients, please click here. There’ll be more information/analysis on the surveys as we dive a little deeper into the project, I just wanted to give you all a small taste of what’s to come (I know, I know it’s a lot of information, but please bear with me; it’ll become much more clear in the coming weeks).

And as always, thank you to all who have made it this far. I’m sorry for the rather long post this time; a lot of important things happened this week and I just wanted to keep you all in the loop :-). Also, next week will be my spring break so unfortunately there won’t be a blog post from me for that time :-(. I’ll definitely miss you guys and I hope this break can make you all hungry for my next post which will resume the week after. Have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the break!