Summer Internship 2011

Anyone who read my old blog last year will remember that I updated you on my summer internship on a weekly basis.  I had another internship this summer, but I felt like weekly updates weren't necessary.  Last year, I had a pretty horrible internship with all kinds of crazy adventures on the bus to Provo, terrible therapists to work with, and lots and lots of old people that all made for very interesting writing.  This year, my internship was 4 minutes from my house (it was closer than the bus stop I went to last year to catch a bus to Provo), I had great therapists to work with, and very cool patients.  It made for a much nicer internship experience, but sadly, much less blog material.

 This year I was at a place called Neruoworx.  They are an outpatient PT clinic who work mainly with spinal cord injury (SCI) patients, but they are also a non-profit organization, which gives them some freedom and some funding to work with patients as much as they need.  Most insurances would provide 15-20 outpatient PT visits per year, and that's just not enough to help a SCI patient rehabilitate.  At Neuroworx, patients were able to come in basically as often as they wanted and work for as long as they wanted.

One thing I hated about being in a hospital last year was that I would only see patients for 2-3 days before they were discharged.  This summer, I pretty much worked with the same patients for the entire 10 weeks I was there.  Dr. Hull, one of the co-founders, likes to say that progress for a SCI patient is "glacially slow", and that is true.  I can't really say that I saw many of those patients progress much in my 10 weeks.  It takes a very long time for them to make any progress.  But when you keep working with the same people for a long time, you come to really care about helping them become as functional as possible.  It worked with a lot of really great patients.

One thing I really liked was Aquatic therapy.  For patients who were very week, getting into the pool could help them move around much better than they could on land.  They had a specialized pool with a treadmill built into the bottom and cameras that showed patients what their legs were doing.  I spent a lot of time in the pool with patients this summer.

 

This is a video a patient put up on YouTube of his pool therapy.  I show up around the 3:20 mark!

KSL News came a few weeks ago and did a story on some patients and a method of treatment we use called Locomotor Training.  You can see me in the background working with a patient at about the 1:30 mark, and can tell a little better that it's actually me at the 2:00 mark.

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

This summer was a much better (though maybe slightly less interesting-to-write-about) experience than my last internship.  I'm glad I could go to a cool place like Neuroworx.  I learned a ton about working with neurological patients, and had a lot of good experiences there