So in our financial endeavor to gather funds for our trip to CSM next year, Zach managed to wrangle up 8 pallets of phone books that we have the next few weeks to deliver. Each route has about 500-600 books but will earn us around $130, so with 18 routes we should be racking in the dough. =)
—Dr. Nelson
We are just over halfway through the quarter and all of us have made it through mid-terms. Just like the weather here in Spokane, things are really heating up. The plethora of project and presentation deadlines are fast approaching and we are scrambling a little bit to get in group meetings to organize each of the 3 presentations. It has been so hard not to want to play Frisbee outside at lunch but our diligence will prevail in this fight against fun in the sun.
Our electrical stimulation section with Dr. Gersh has finally concluded. We literally charged through the course content at a strong but tolerable rate with little rest interval and our brains feel a little like the muscles that we were stimulating during our labs: fatigued. We learned an incredible amount on the clinical application of electrical modalities and now we have a strong evidence base for our future practice. But we keep on keeping on and there is light at the end of the tunnel with Dr. V’s portion of the class seeming a little more manageable. Labs are split up amongst the weeks class periods so that we aren’t required at each period.
In our Educational Aspects of PT class taught by Dr. C and Dr. LaPier we are learning was in which to engage patients in physical exercise. We have covered the theoretical basis of the stages the patients will be going through as they begin or continue exercise through physical therapy and the complications and protocols that arise with each of the stages. We have also been given different assessments that can help us determine the learning style of the patient which is critical in planning and conducting a successful exercise/treatment intervention.
For therapeutic exercise we have finished our joint mobilization section which culminated with our practical examination involving a hypothetical case/patient that we had to supply and intervention plan, treatment, and follow up for with modifications thrown in there to simulate real life difficulties that we as therapists will have to adapt to all the time in the clinic. We are now moving on to the aerobic exercise section of the course which is complimented well by Dr. LaPier’s course in clinical physiology. Currently in physiology we are moving on from energy systems, metabolism, and fatigue to muscular endurance and cardio vascular implications to exercise, overlapping perfectly with therapeutic exercise.
In preparation for our clinical internships this summer we have been working with Dr. Palmer on WebPT which is an electronic medical record program that is common in clinics and having the basis of knowledge will help immensely for when our clinical experiences come around. Some of us in the class have already received notification of acceptance in our first ten week internships for the fall of 2014 which is quite exciting and daunting at the same time because it feels as if we only started the program yesterday. The other news is the new onboarding clinical management system that Dr. Palmer has instituted this year called Acadaware. It allows us to investigate potential internship sites, manage our internship affiliations, and load our necessary paperwork, medical prerequisites, and certificates securely onto an online program which we will be using for the remainder of our internships, hopefully streamlining some of the process.
In other news Fundraising has been going well as we are all spreading the word and collecting sponsors and donations for our main events; the Auction and the Wild Moose Chase Trail Run. We have had a great turnout at the local race events including Bloomsday where we have taken the opportunity to talk with local enthusiasts about our trail run and our cause. After Bloomsday our racers even got together for a little BBQ potluck to blow off any steam they had left from the 7-mile race. On another fundraising note we have entered a photo contest hosted by the APTA that will hopefully rack in a little more dough. The student WSU and EWU student governments have hasted so awesome events like free catered food and music a couple Fridays ago, and this past week WSU hosted complimentary coffee and breakfast for their finals week which all of us took advantage of because we are all a big family here on campus (or at least we think so) =)
We are back again with a clean slate and backpacks chocked full of new books. It is only the end of week two of the quarter but we are already studying for our first exam. In our curriculum we are always transitioning to new topics with a major emphasis on what we have already learned in a sort of cyclical fashion. One of our courses this quarter is Applied Neuroscience in which we have to recall last quarters neuro content for Dr. Gersh’s half of the course focused on electrical stimulation and its functional application. Last week in lab we did sensory testing of the body which integrated many of those neural pathways that we harped on in Dr. V’s class last quarter.
In our Therapeutic Exercise course we are now learning ways in which to engage with the patients whom we spent the past half of a year learning examinations and evaluations for. We started by learning about joint mobilizations which can be very effective treatments for patients with limited joint mobility and the corresponding capsular pattern. Along with what we have been learning, our prior knowledge of the body’s surface anatomy and arthrokinematics has been pertinent.
As a transition from clinical anatomy, we have started our section of physiology with Dr. LaPier. This is our first class with one of the leading cardiopulmonary researchers with a resume the size of some of our textbooks, and so far so good. She is teeming with knowledge and slowly but surely we are soaking it up. Right now we are laying the foundation for our interaction with patients. Seeing as we will all be working with patients with systemic disease, it is in this class that we will be learning the physiological impact of and treatment considerations for the primary pathologies that our future patients will present with.
To complement our physiology course, we are learning Pharmacology with Dr. Russell. Along with those systemic pathologies comes the myriad of medications and prescription drugs to help facilitate healing. But with any drug there are physiological consequences and Dr. Russell is going to help us learn how these drugs will influence who we can treat, and how the drugs will impact our intervention strategies.
With all that being said, IT is time for some sleep to get ready for what comes next! =)
Practicing gait deviations in functional anatomy. =)
It has been too long since I have posted so this may be a bit overwhelming but here goes nothing! We are all very relieved to have made it through the long winter. The bi-polar northwest weather kept us guessing, changing from hail to snow to a bright sunny day within hours. In the classroom it was a bit more consistent.
Since I have last posted we have had our annual open house for accepted and wait-listed students to come and visit the campus. Many of the current students and their significant others helped lead tours, participated in information panels, and answered many questions that the prospects inquired about life in the program. Overall it was a great success with a promising show of potential and enthusiasm.
Neuroscience definitely picked up toward the end of the quarter. The cumulative laboratory final was quite daunting walking into the classroom with brain cross-sections laid out all over the lab with pins identifying the structures. We all made it through and the subsequent two tests, including the final, were tough and in rapid succession, our brains working at full throttle. But above all Dr. V and his appropriately intermittent stories kept us laughing in class making the two hour class periods much more enjoyable.
In functional anatomy Dr. Nelson has effectively transformed all of us into the weirdos on campus. The second half of this quarter has been all about gait, gait, and more gait. We have been learning about gait deviations, causes, pathologies, patterns, etc and now we are constantly analyzing the gait of everyone on campus, identifying plantar flexion contractures and compensated trendelenburg signs. To say the least we have been getting some odd looks from fellow students. We capped it all off with a final practical where we all had the opportunity to play the role as the physical therapist as well as become one of those individuals that we had been watching ever so closely.
Clinical anatomy has finally come to an end. We had to say goodbye to the dissection bodies that were donated to us by the University of Washington. We finished off the remaining of our lab times disarticulating joints and dissecting out the visceral organs and pelvis. Using these bodies have really helped us put into context the organization and variation of the human musculoskeletal structure. Its great because we are now learning how to integrate that structural information and the functional implications into our intervention plans.
As soon as we really got to know Dr. Cleary in our diagnosis course, she is back on sabbatical. But she definitely did not leave us empty handed. She helped us learn some of the most important facets of physical therapy, like how to recognize when a patient presents with a problem that is outside of the scope of our practice. In the last few weeks before finals we went through all of the systems and identified signs, symptoms, and clinical presentations of diseases that primarily impact these systems.
It was a long road but spring break has arrived and we have all survived. As the weather gets better our spirits will continue blossom similar to the trees around campus (which are long overdue for some color). But the cold still seems to find its way into Spokane but we can all feel that Jack Frost is on his way out and the Easter Bunny will be bringing some more sun. =)
Lets just say we had a heart to heart in Dr. Russell’s class before dissecting the thoracic cavity today. =)
Tiffany’s birthday celebration. Nobody gets away from us on their birthday! =) #teamspirit
Valentine’s Day serenade for Rikki from her secret valentine. =)
