Describe an evaluation opportunity you have had this semester. How will this event influence your future clinical actions or clinical decision making?
A couple weeks ago, I was able to evaluate a knee injury that had occurred on a football player. The athlete had already been evaluated by the Football Athletic Trainer the day before, and he asked me to evaluate it just so I could get the experience. The athlete was having some pain in the anterior knee, and the knee was a little swollen. I palpated a variety of structures, and it seemed like the athlete didn't have a whole lot of pain, just some pain on the superior and inferior border of the patella. The athletes ROM was lacking in flexion and extension, and MMT was 3/5. After a barrage of special tests, the patellar glide test caused pretty intense pain for the athlete. From this I determined that the athlete had suffered a subluxed patella. I reported my findings to Cole and he said that his evaluation yielded the same diagnosis. He asked about some of the things that had happened during the evaluation like pain locations and ROM results. Turns out that the athletes ROM was slightly less than the day before. This will influence my future clinical actions because of the change from day to day. This instance makes me think that it wouldn't be a bad idea to periodically evaluate the athlete during the rehabilitation process just to make sure that the condition is getting better, and to determine the effectiveness of the rehabilitation program. Overall this experience will make me think about doing multiple evaluations on a single injury to determine severity of the injury as well as effectiveness of rehabilitation.
One of my clinical goals this semester is to learn more about blood restriction training, and learn the implications in the rehab setting for this type of training. In the past, about three years ago, I had read an article that wasn’t really from a relatively non-credible source about this type of training. I thought the article was pretty interesting at the time so I attempted to research some things about this type of training. During my research I found that there wasn’t much information about blood restrictive training when talking about using it in the rehabilitation setting, only using it in the bodybuilding setting. According to a group of bodybuilders, blood restriction training allowed them to see huge gains in strength and muscle size, in much less time training. So instead of spending literally half the day training, they were able to reduce their training to 3-4 hours per day. There was no explanation of the science behind this type of training really, just an explanation that pretty much said that it worked. Now I’m not sure how much of this was placebo effect, or if there is any credibility to their statements, but it did peak my interest. From this, I have decided to do my clinical question research on this topic, and possibly pursue this topic for my senior research project. I have talked to some people in the strength training realm about this and it seems as if they are not really sure how this works either, so I feel that research on this type of training could be beneficial in terms of rehabilitation and strength training. Through my clinical question I would like to find out if there is any credibility to this training, and figure out if there is a way to implicate this into rehabilitation programs and possibly get athletes back on the field sooner, with better rehabilitation results. As a senior ATS, what do you perceive to be your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
As a senior Athletic Training Student, I feel that I am pretty in tune with my strengths and weaknesses as of right now. A few of my strengths include Evaluation of injuries, understanding patients concerns regarding an injury, and communicating with patients and my preceptors. I have done many evaluations in my time in the Athletic Training Program and I am thankful for all of the opportunities I have had to complete these evaluations. For example, I was able to do a couple evaluations this past Saturday at the Emory & Henry football game. For one of them the athlete came to me during the middle of the game and was describing to me that he had hurt his hand. By using my evaluation skills I was able to determine that the athlete had suffered a grade 1 UCL sprain of his 5th PIP joint. I confirmed this with my preceptor and then discussed with the athlete that he could finish playing the game, but I would like to apply buddy taping to the finger in order to reduce the movement of the joint. I also instructed the athlete to come into the clinic after the game so that we could get a better evaluation. Even after this evaluation by Cole, he told me that my sideline evaluation was good. I felt that this instance also shows my strengths in understanding patients. I kind of had to do this evaluation on the fly and the athlete didn’t really know exactly what happened. I had to piece this puzzle together with the little information that the athlete provided. I think this example also shows how I am able to communicate with my preceptors in a positive way. I believe that my main weakness is always wanting to voice my opinion when speaking to a preceptor or an athlete. I feel like sometimes this makes my preceptors a little angry with me. One way I could improve this is to take in the whole situation before I interject what I think into the conversation. This has happened a couple times in the past when speaking about evaluations, one happened this past Saturday. Overall I feel that my strengths far outweigh my weaknesses. |
AuthorCarson Bryant Archives
April 2018
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