Occupational Therapy
What is "occupational therapy"?
An occupational therapist is a health care specialty that's focused on a patient's physical abilities. It's very diverse, there are many different things that an occupational therapist can do but, in general, they're focused on the patient's ability to perform their own self-care. Your “ADL's” – your activities of daily living. This can include your ability to bathe, your ability to toilet your self, your ability to get cleaned up, your ability to dress, comb your hair, wash your face. They can be highly specialized – you can have occupational therapists that know how to do visual rehabilitation so if you have limitations in your seeing because of particular eye injuries … they can be focused on your ability to swallow and helping you restore swallowing function. They can help you evaluate your ability to function in the community. How would you get to a store, how would you function within that store – would you be able to use the cart, would you be able to gather your own groceries, would you be able to pay for the groceries. So community activities, if there's a limitation there, an occupational therapist can help design a therapy program to help you regain those abilities or teach you compensatory techniques if you're not going to be able to do that specific activity.
