ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

Another significant theme in my 2011 forum conversations was pushing back against fad OT interventions. I think that it is an important enough topic to be re-posted here. Some of the fad and pseudoscientific interventions that I discussed in forums this year included therapeutic listening and other auditory interventions, deep pressure protocols (brushing programs), weighted vests, and Brain Gym. Fad interventions were relatively common in health care until research came along - and now we have mechanisms to test and see if people's 'ideas' about something hold up to any scrutiny. One posting asked about the validity of 'astronaut training' which is something that I get phone calls about in my private practice. I tried running database searches on 'astronaut training' and 'vestibular-visual protocol' and several other iterations that I hoped would capture this protocol and as usual for this kind of fad intervention I was unable to find any researc...

I wondered this morning how much writing I have done on various OT message boards and I started thinking that an awful lot of my opinions are probably documented all over the Internet. I visited the forums on the AOTA website and found the equivalent of over 40 single spaced pages of my writing! Then I thought it might be interesting to see what motivated me to post on professional forums this year. Here is a summary of one interesting forum conversation: The Social Justice Debates Early this year there was a motion to rescind part of newly adopted AOTA ethics statements; the concern was that they unnecessarily referenced social justice concepts and that the existing ethics statements already covered that conceptual material and did so without politically charged terms like 'social justice.' The new ethics documents includes: SOCIAL JUSTICE Principle 4. Occupational therapy personnel shall provide services in a fair and equitable manner. Social justice, also called distri...

I don't mince words, mostly because I lack time to do so and secondarily because I lack interest in political correctness. Let's talk straight about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. For some background and additional reading on the debacles that occur when government intrudes into health care decision making click on the 'health insurance' topics in this blog. At the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, Nancy Pelosi made her now famous remarks You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention -- it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to...