Reflect on your progress with the completion of your clinical packet? Was the goal you set achievable? Realistic? Will you approach your clinical packet differently next semester of have you found a system that works?
This semester I have been pretty behind on filling out my clinical packet. As of right now I have written up 55 attempts, 11 masteries, but still need signatures on many of them. I think the goal that I set, to complete 6 masteries a week, was reasonable, but I was not diligent enough to do what my goal states. I believe that a lot of it had to do with the rigor of this semester for me. I am taking 4 classes that require much time outside of class and clinical. Those classes are Connections, Human Anatomy, Physiology (which also requires us to complete a service learning project on top of all the clinical hours I am required to get each semester), and Art. Art takes up a ton of time. In order to keep a good grade in there, I would say that I spend 8-10 hours per week working on various assignments, and often more than one at a time. Another reason that the attempts number is so low is because we are supposed to be getting quite a few attempts from organization and administration projects, but the class is WAY behind, and we haven’t turned in any projects yet (there are 5 pretty large group projects that are due in… about 2 weeks…). The goal was very realistic if I would have kept up with it better during the semester. I will definitely approach the clinical packet differently next semester because I cannot afford to get behind. With 40 baseball games in one semester, getting behind would cause me to do very poorly in my classes, and in baseball, and even could effect whether or not I graduated on time. Overall I have learned one big thing from my clinical packet goal… follow it, and don’t get behind! What domain of AT (5 domains) do you feel most confident with, which one do you consider to be your weakness? What do you think would help you to strengthen your weaker domains?
I feel that I am the most confident in the injury prevention domain of Athletic Training. I am good at detecting movement patterns that could potentially cause someone to be at a higher risk for injury. I also feel that I am good at crafting things such as braces that can help an athlete prevent injury. I am also the most interested in this domain of Athletic Training. I feel that some of the best insight I have had was during my clinical rotation with Kris Johnston. We spent a lot of time looking at risk factors in baseball players, specifically pitchers and arm injuries. Some of the things I learned from this included; proper strength ratios between anterior upper body muscles and poster upper body muscles, how arm slot and “springiness” can affect a pitchers risk for injury, how band and weighted ball programs can decrease risk of injury when used properly, and many more things. Overall I believe that injury prevention is my best domain of the 5 in Athletic Training. I believe that my two worst domains are organization and administration, and rehabilitation. I think that organization and administration makes me less confident because I am still in that class, and I really feel like I am not learning all that much in organization and administration right now. We haven’t really even turned in any assignments in there other than ones that just felt like busy work, and now since we are just getting assigned 4 LARGE projects at one time with really no time to complete them properly. With that said, I feel that I have the least amount of knowledge in the organization and administration domain. I think that my second largest weakness is rehabilitation. Honestly I don’t really know why I feel this way about rehab. I had a pretty good project and outcomes with my case study last semester, even though the patient’s compliance was terrible. I feel that I can design a pretty good rehab program. Sometimes I just get a little confused on how fast to progress the athlete. I believe that part of this is due to the fact that everyone heals differently in different time frames. But even so, sometimes I have a little less confidence in this domain. Describe a treatment you performed/designed. Why did you select that? What was your intended outcome? How did you assess its effectiveness? How will that experience influence your future clinical decision making?
I performed an ultrasound on a football player about 2 weeks ago that had been having some distal hamstring pain and tightness. Every day we had been stretching the athlete before practice and according to the athlete it didn’t really help him that much during practice. The problem was that the athlete never came in during rehab and treatment hours according to Cole. I was sitting there wondering how the athlete ever expected to get any better without ever showing up to treatment in order to address the issue. I decided to try continuous ultrasound in order to try and loosen and heat the tissue that had been giving the athlete trouble during practice just to see if we could do something different that had better outcomes. Immediately after finishing the treatment the athlete said that it felt better than when I began the treatment. The athlete went out to practice and said that he had very little trouble out of the hamstring that day, just a little bit of tightness. So overall I would say this is the way I assessed the outcome. The athlete preferred the ultrasound over the stretching before practice to relieve pain. Now it would be great if the athlete would actually come in during rehab and treatment hours in order to do some flexibility training and to really get the hamstring to 100%, but of course, that doesn’t happen all the time. Overall I think that I will begin to think about ultrasound and stretching for athletes that have hamstring issues, before games or practices, along with flexibility training every day during treatment hours. Reflect on your progress on one of your clinical goals.
One of my clinical goals are to “learn more about blood restriction training and rehab by studying this topic, and completing my little clinical question. So far I haven’t done a whole lot with this goal other than begin to look at some things related to it. So I have been looking at some videos and online forums that discuss this topic, mostly in the bodybuilding world. I have talked with coach Wyatt Briggs, our new strength coach, about some of the things he has heard about this topic. He showed me a website that has the proper equipment and teaches how to use blood restriction training properly. The site is Kabuki strength. They sell the cuffs that are used to restrict blood flow as well as books that talk about how to use this training method properly to achieve maximum size and strength gains. Still, most of the information I have found has not been related to rehabilitation, just to hypertrophy and strength gains. It is kind of funny to see all of the videos of people doing it online and doing it improperly. Many people will use some type of large rubber tubing or band to restrict the blood flow, and even completely stop the flow of blood, which is completely wrong. They are literally setting themselves up for massive injury and even blood clots. There are even people that are shown using modified belts, and they will tighten them as tight as they can get. Even with all these improper techniques, I still haven’t found any massive or extensive injuries that have occurred due to people doing the wrong things while utilizing this type of training. Often people will completely cut off blood, or make a tourniquet like restriction for 5 minutes or more at one time. My big question is how do these people think that this is helping them, and how do they not see the potential for injury in this situation? I am sure before long since this technique is slowly gaining popularity, someone will have a massive injury that can be attributed to doing this improperly. |
AuthorCarson Bryant Archives
April 2018
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