ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog

A story worth re-posting: A fairly standard component of my pediatric occupational therapy evaluations is to ask the child to draw a picture of themselves. This assessment technique provides an opportunity to evaluate the child's skill with writing and also is a functional assessment of their cognitive and perceptual ability. Sometimes kids draw things that just beg to be probed and questioned - as was the case recently. I watched intently as 6 year old Patrick drew a representation of himself, but then he began adding odd details to his picture. First he colored dark spots on his figure's hands and feet, and then added a row of X's across the forehead. I leaned forward and quizzically asked, "Patrick, what are these marks here?" He looked at me for a moment and then responded: "Jesus died for you, you know. He got nailed to a cross, in his hands and his feet. My Dad said that he had to wear prickers on his head and it made him bleed....

This image caught my attention when I attended the Presidential Address at the AOTA national conference in Philadelphia last week, and it has been tweeted around in occupational therapy circles since that time. The question is - what does it mean? The AOTA president discussed population health as a concept that she believes will be integral to occupational therapy's future vision.  Unfortunately, this vision has more to do with a misguided alignment with payment models (Triple Aim) than anything to do with patient care. This unusual vision has been promoted by other occupational therapists and also discussed extensively in this blog here and here and here and here , to link a few. What exactly is the meaning of this word cloud?  The initial intent of word clouds was to provide a base narrative analysis of content within written text.  Even at their best they are crude, because the words are presented in a decontextualized format. In this example the word clou...

In a recent article appearing on the CNN website, author Wayne Drash reviews the concept of 'wrongful birth' in context of Lesli, a person who has developmental disabilities.  Drash's profile states that he "specializes in stories off the radar" and that "his passion is to tell narratives about life and the unfolding drama of the world we live in." It would be more accurate to state that Drash cherry picked one person's perspective and advanced a fiction that serves one ideological perspective. His initial description of Lesli in his opening sentence tells us everything he believes about her person-hood.  He immediately goes to the 'fetal position' trope that promotes his message of Lesli's helplessness and haplessness. For just a moment the reader is led to believe that there may be another side of the story to be told as he describes Lesli's joy at having her mother hold her hand - but the author quickly reverts to reporting...