ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

Also titled: How occupational therapy can stop arguing for inclusion and start designing itself into relevance Occupational therapy spends a lot of time talking about being ‘overlooked.’ But being overlooked isn’t a visibility problem—it’s a design problem. We’ve built a profession that is extraordinarily self-aware and socially conscious, but not always system-literate. We’re fluent in the language of empathy, occupation, and participation but often ill-equipped to translate that into the economic, technological, and policy structures that drive decision-making. How did that happen? When OTs ask, “Why don’t companies hire us for product design, UX, or consulting?"  the answer isn’t bias. It’s fit . The market doesn’t know what to do with occupational therapy rhetoric (jargon) because we rarely show up with the frameworks, data fluency, and deliverables those systems require. Talk to an engineer, and you hear systems. Talk to an OT, and you hear an apology and an elevator sp...

Also titled:  Why OT’s next evolution must move from consumption to creation I’ve been writing about occupational therapy’s educational evolution for nearly two decades, and this feels like the conversation we need to have next. For years, the justification for moving occupational therapy education to the doctoral level has centered on an oft-repeated promise: we will gain a seat at the table. The logic was simple enough - if we matched the credentials of our peers in other health professions, we’d gain equal standing, influence, and voice. I believe that assumption, though comforting, is wrong. A degree doesn’t grant influence. Credentials open doors, but they don’t dictate what happens once you step through them. A “seat at the table” means very little if the table itself was built by someone else, and if all we do is wait to be served. I’ve been a vocal critic of the mandatory entry-level OTD for exactly that reason. The last time we went through a similar transition - from ...