on the OTher hand

The process of producing on the OTher hand blog has enhanced my future as an occupational therapist. As a beginning to my professional portfolio I have linked the first and most important blogs posted on edublogs.org:

Blog #1: Hello world welcome post      http://myot.edublogs.org/2008/01/24/hello-world/

Blog #2: My blog mentor              http://myot.edublogs.org/2008/01/29/my-blog-mentor/

Blog #3: Blogs, blogs, blogs, who’s to say which one is the best? http://myot.edublogs.org/2008/02/04/blogs-blogs-blogs-whos-to-say-which-one-is-the-best/

As an addition to my occupational therapy portfolio I have added a research paper on autism and how occupational therapy can effectively treat certain behaviors associated with the disorder . The link to this report can be found at: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc56bc6r_0hrnvfvdm&hl=en

PowerPoint presentations are revolutionizing the way people of the past used to do presentations.  The old style of standing in front of an audience and talking for two hours about a product is history.  Nowadays, people use computer technology to project information onto a screen for spectators to have visual aids accompanied by the verbal presentation. 

Slideshare.net is a website where the general public can post their example PowerPoint presentations for web2.0 audiences to view.  “Identity vs. Brand extended” is a power point presentation posted on Slide Share at: http://www.slideshare.net/astanford/identity-vs-brand.  As a professional or student, this site is very helpful in providing useful information and example presentations for future PowerPoint users.  “Identity vs. Brand extended” is an excellent example of a presentation that is simple, concrete, and to the point.  The title page slide has a clear white background with four bright apples and one orange, all other slides in the presentation are accented with the image from the title page.  The following slides maintain the same bright red color of the apples as a backdrop to the clear white writing.  The point to this presentation is that once a product becomes popular in a collective group, it forms a brand name.  The most eye-catching part of this slide show is the visual presentation.  It is filled with color, simplicity, and lack of clutter.  The bright background with the large white fonts forms a great contrast making it attention grabbing and easy to read.  The pictures included are casual forms of how people project themselves to society.  Each slide contains one to two pictures with a few words and no bullet points. The combination of pictures and the theme represent a strong point to the presentation. 

The essence of PowerPoint presentations is becoming a necessity in most professional disciplines.  Modern audiences are being more receptive to visual presentations compared to the typical speech-like presentations of the past that put audiences to sleep.  “Identity vs. Brand extended” is a successfully appealing and easily understood presentation.

Occupational Therapy (OT) is one of the fastest growing careers of the twenty-first century. Consequently, this is putting therapists at extremely high demands because there are not enough OT’s to meet the needs of society. For example, some therapists may work Mondays and Wednesdays in a hospital seeing patients recovering from surgery. On Tuesdays they see in-home clients requiring early intervention therapy due to birth defects or premature birth. On Thursdays they work at a specialized clinic to integrate animal therapy for children with autism. And Fridays are set aside for scheduling assessments from different agencies to evaluate whether prospective clients qualify for therapy. This reflects a typical workweek of a therapist working per-diem. Therapist many times chose to work per-diem since working for several different companies can pay almost twice as much as working full-time in a school district or hospital setting. The difference in pay can be attributed to the lack of paid benefits that is normally included with full-time employment. With such a complicated and deeply involved schedule one could not imagine working without some type of agenda. What better solution than the Scheduly application?

This search engine has a vast amount of beneficial uses for the average OT. Not only is it an online scheduler for the therapist, but clients are able to go online to see the scheduling availability for the OT. It also has the function to allow clients to schedule their own appointment at any time. For a therapist that is working per-diem, Scheduly becomes of essence to meet the needs of several different employers. The program has many functions and a small amount of set-up is required. First, the user needs to create an account with Scheduly where he is given a basic template to be customized by the customer. Each requested employer is accepted onto the therapist’s list of authorized clients. Next the clients requesting or qualifying for therapy are added to the clientele list and introduced to how Scheduly works. The therapist’s job is to tailor the program to their personal needs, and further schedule in any personal time which no job nor client could occupy. This information could be visible in detail to the public, available to only certain people like family, or left only to be viewed by the therapist and seen as blocked out time to everyone else. Once the therapist has scheduled in private time, the clients are to go to the site and pick the time that best fits their schedule. When the client picks the scheduled time, this information is immediately sent to the therapist who can approve, cancel, or block the appointment requested. Coincidently, on the same page there is a map with the schedule allowing a time slot for the driving time to and from one client to the next. With such a demanding schedule, occupational therapists are in desperate need of a sophisticated but simple tool to keep track of all scheduling issues. The answer for this dilemma is Scheduly!!! Therapists who are just starting in the field or just finished with school are probably looking for some extra clientele. Scheduly also posts the one or more services offered by the therapist on the web and/or your personal webpage in order to increase clients and revenue. This turns a useful scheduling application into a business advertisement also.

With the exceeding demands of occupational therapists in today’s society, finding time to make and receive calls takes away from the time that could be better spent helping a client live a more fulfilling and satisfying life. Not to mention, it is extremely time consuming to schedule a pool of over a hundred clients. Scheduly is the ideal program application for an occupational therapist. It is an online scheduler for an OT business and the client is able to go online to see scheduling availability and schedule their own appointments. Having an application like Scheduly frees up time that could be better spent assisting a client in need.

Scheduly was started up by Oren Tivony whose career consists of being a software developer and entrepreneur at Clirity. Along with several of his colleagues, in February of 2007, Tivony decided to launch this application in which businesses could post their appointment schedules online in order for clients to self schedule their engagements and life in general. In particular, this application engine is used to free up time and take away the need for extra office assistants to schedule appointments and take care of typical clerical work. For independent businesses this application can be used to promote the business along with scheduling personal time, work hours, family time, free time, and anything else that would be sketched into a hand written agenda. Best of all, it’s free!!!

One could ask why use Scheduly instead of a typical hand written appointment book. First of all it is easy to use; it has step by step instructions on how to post the schedule to your web page, how to put in your available hours, where to add in personal time, how to put in a description of the services you are offering, and how to publish your business to the rest of the world. Once you have posted Scheduly, it works like a widget. In other words, as one person grabs the most convenient time slot available online, it is automatically updated to your calendar, and within seconds you can approve, cancel, or block the appointment time requested. On the same page as where the schedules are formed, there is a convenient link that maps out the location that is needed. If the client needs to go to your business it maps out your location for them, on the other hand if you need to go to the client’s house, their location is mapped out for you. Scheduly also allows you to manage your pool of clients by letting only authorized clients to schedule your services. For anyone and everyone who is accustomed to using a hand held agenda, Scheduly is the new and improved form of scheduling all your needs through the advanced technology of web 2.0.

 Sometimes it takes a bit getting used to, but finding the right application for your business is essential for success. As an occupational therapist, there is an essence for organization and neatness within the workplace. OT’s may work independently for several organizations or some can possibly work for one organization but have many clients on their case load. In both scenarios OT’s need to be organized and well put together.  On the web 2.0 there are thousands of different applications that can assist a variety of businesses in turning this timely task into a pleasurable moment. Scheduly-Free-Your-Time at: http://www.scheduly.com/ is an excellent resource for an occupational therapist. As time is of essence to everyone, the most significant part of this application is that it emphasizes the importance of freeing up time versus booking it. Regardless of the career, it is important to prioritize in order to free up every moment possible for the development of personal wellness. One of the benefits of becoming an OT is the option to choose whether to work 60 hours a week, 40 hours a week, 20 hours a week, or simple on an on-call basis. By having an online application, one can better schedule in clients and allow enough time for family, friends, and self. This application not only allows you to schedule your personal life, but also allows for your work schedule to be posted on line in order for your clients to find the best slot that suits their schedules. How convenient is this? It completely eliminates the phone tag commonly played out between clients and therapist, it allows for employers to check their employee’s schedules, and it keeps the OT on schedule with constant online pop-up reminders. Fascinating isn’t it? This application will soon become my new online, hour to hour agenda while working as an occupational therapist.

The new hot topic of the year-AUTISM- as this becomes a more and more common disability, more people are interested in what it is. Having thousands of children and now adults being diagnosed with this disability, is giving way to the interest of discussion and research. 15 years ago this was a developmental disorder labeled to children who lacked any kind of social interaction along with severe speech and language delays.  Parents were identified as being at fault for the child disability, many times the mother was referred to as a “refrigerator mother”.  This name was paired with a mother who lacked the social bonding and interaction with her child during the infant/toddler stage of life.  As you could imagine this type of accusation was mind boggling for the parent who felt that their interaction with their child was the same as all her other children, and how could this possibly be true.  Fortunately in the past 10 years this theory has proven false.  There is now speculation that a gene is found linked to autism, yet, some believe that there must be an environmental trigger that is provoking the onset of autism in a child.

Unfortunately because of new research and a substantial enlargement of the autism spectrum, children are being diagnosed with autism who would have never even been considered a candidate ten years ago.  In the past there was only the diagnosis of typical autism.  Now there exist a huge spectrum that includes; mild, moderate, and severe autism, Asperger’s syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, along with several other small categories.  In other word a child is diagnosed with autism like behaviors and they are automatically placed under this huge umbrella and labeled as being on the “autism spectrum”.  This is also a problem for those identified as Asperger’s, which is a high functioning form of autism referred to as idiot savant in the past, because they are now being identified as on the spectrum as an adult when autism is a disability that should be diagnosed in the first five years of life.  Another example is children with speech delays, many times if they have any type of autistic behaviors they are immediately labeled as possibly on the spectrum, when ten years ago they may have not even been given speech therapy because they would be expected to grow out of the delay.

As of today there is no proven fact as to what is causing autism or why the numbers are so high?  Some tend to call this disorder an epidemic, unfortunately that would turn this into a disease because developmental disorders never increase substantially in numbers, they remain fairly constant throughout history.  Society does not want to accept this completely a genetic issue because genetic mutations also do not grow in numbers.  Yet there must be some kind of genetic linkage because siblings of an autistic child have a one in four chance of being autistic, versus 1 in 155 of the average child.  There has also been links found with children born to schizophrenic, manic depressive, and bipolar parents.  Nor does society want to consider this completely an environmental issue, because of the difficulty in pinpointing what could possibly be affecting so many children.  As for now theorist are concluding that there is a genetic predisposition to being autistic, in the past this may have been seem as the odd child, computer geek, with little social skills and mild developmental delays not severe enough for a special education placement.  Once the child has this genetic predisposition theorist are suspecting that there is something in our environment that is triggering the autism to surface in the early years of life, whereas in the past that environmental trigger was non-existent.  People have suspected things like pesticides used in farmlands, hormones added to our meat products, the increase in use of plastic products, the increase in air pollution in the past ten years, and most commonly heard of is the use of mercury in children’s vaccinations, as well as the increase in number of vaccinations given per doctor’s visits.  This being common occurrences in most children’s lives it is very difficult to pinpoint a particular environmental change in autistic children.   

These are all new hot topics of research because the controversy continue to rise as to whether autism is actually increasing in numbers or has the autism spectrum grown so much that many of those identified today would have never been identified fifteen years ago.  For some time other countries of the world could not understand how the United States had such a dramatic increase in number of diagnosis, yet as time has passed, more countries are adapting the same criteria for diagnosing children under the autism spectrum.  The statistics of these countries are sky rocketing exactly the same as they have in the past ten years here in the US.  Hopefully the research and studies will continue to happen until some form of prevention or cure is discovered for the millions of families struggling to find answers.  

After three quite agonizing hours removing a virus that had attached to my computer, I am finally able to begin writing.  Being that I have not yet bought an Apple computer, I am in constant fear of contracting viruses because of all the new applications and downloads we get, just as an FYI I have three different antivirus program installed in my computer, apparently it is not enough. 

Anyways, back to my topic, looking through my Pageflakes I found a new post regarding the interesting experiences an occupational therapy intern was going through in her adult day care facility internship program on:  http://otstudents.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-second-and-final-week-of-level-i.html.  More interestingly I found a link to an autistic blogger on one of her old postings.  The link was http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism with an article written about, 27 year old Amanda Baggs.  This is an absolutely miraculous article with an amazing U-tube video attached.  Having worked with the autistic population for such a long period of time, one sees the beginning of this video as a typical low functioning autistic person, and falls in absolute amazement by the end of the video.  This young woman appears to be severely autistic by her predominant stemming, repetitive behaviors of flapping her hands, rocking back and forth, avoiding all eye contact, non-verbal “human language”, yet she is humming a repeated sound throughout the video.  As the video progresses Amanda starts typing the story behind this video and a robotic voice reads her typing.  Not only do you find out that she is the one who has put this video together on her own without anyone’s help, but you also come to find out the perspective of what some come to believe as a severely autistic non-functional person. 

Amanda talks about the frustration of her form of interpreting things through the senses like touch, taste, feel, and hear, yet for the simple reason that she does not speak the language of other humans, people look at her as less of a human being.  Not only is her language ability equivalent or superior to that of an average 27-year old, but she reasons and describes what she feels and how she interprets the outside world.  Her descriptions are vividly similar to what autism specialists describe as the true feelings and understanding of an autistic individual.

I found this article fascinating, and to a certain point, a bit scary.  I say this because in my line of work we come across many children that look and act just like Amanda, and similarly to her they have very little or no verbal language.  They rock, stem, and act as if they were obsolete to the outside world.  We as care givers look at them as severely autistic and find it difficult to get any type of response from them demonstrating a slight improvement in abilities and as Amanda states much of it goes back to the ability to speak our “human language”.  This video interpretation makes me go back to the hundreds of children I have worked with and makes me think whether or not these children were able understand and comprehend so much more than I could have ever imagined.

Amanda is even more bewildering in the fact that she is living in a group home because she in unable to care for herself, she cannot bath, prepare her own food, nor take care of daily living activities, yet her ability to use the computer to interpret her feelings is miraculous.  She mentions that some people may think that someone else has set up this computer video for her because of her visibly apparent abilities, but she claims that her care takers would not even know how to apply the computer programs to her computer.  I am still in amazement to think that someone with such a lack of general living abilities would be able to communicate so vividly her true feelings of living life with autism and the interpretation of her particular form of communication.  I would also hope that someone, like Amanda, with such capabilities could help research centers in autism, discover how to bring these abilities out in other severely autistic children and adults.  As a care giver for many autistic children I would admire the ability to better communicate with my clients in order to better serve their needs.  I would want to allow them to continue being their autistic selves, yet improve their communication to the world in a way we could better understand their frustrations, pleasures, anger, and happiness.           

As time passes I am finding out that OT must not be the hot new blogging topic.  There are several blogs started by students and OT practitioners that seem to run for a year or so, if that.  Many appear to be blogs that are started by students as an assignment, yet they only run for what seems to be the length of a semester or about a one year term.  In other words there are few updated blogs, if any in the past month.  One of the most consistent bloggers is ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog.  The last post is one of my favorite interest—Autism.  Tantrum or not a tantrum, describes the reaction an autistic child with developmental delays, and the struggles she gives her parents who are trying to get her to wear a new pair of shoes.  This is a typical disturbance of an autistic child; anything new seems to cause discomfort and irritableness.  The question is whether the tantrum the child throws is because he or she knows that the parent does not want to put up a fight, or whether the discomfort of a new shoe is truly uncomfortably disturbing.  Fascinated by this topic I find that many times it is the parent who gives into behaviors, and the child who discovers how to push the right buttons in order to get what is wanted out of the situation.  Parent many times believe that because the child is disabled they would not know how to manipulate behaviors, but autistic children especially, with or without other developmental delays know very well who they can manipulate and who will not budge regardless of behaviors.  It is up to the parent to discover how to modify and diminish behaviors before they become out of hand.     

It is not common for occupational therapy blogs to post on a daily basis, but some post more often than others, I found an interesting comment on Pageflakes this morning, on Occupational Therapy-Educational Issues, http://oteducation.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/a-very-quick-posting-on-visitors-to-my-occupational-therapy-blog/ I found it interesting that she commented on how her last check of blog stats she had over 6,000 visitors to her post.  This is really exciting for me.  I want to find out where to check my visitors, maybe a year from now I will be the one with 6,000 visitors, we’ll just have to wait and see!!  As a career in OT, blogging will open many door to ultimately reach my final goal—opening my privately owned clinic.  As technology advances I can see parents and potential customers visiting my blog before considering me as their therapist.  People may vary well comment on my post several times before even considering me to see how I respond to their comments.  From their response to my posts and comments they may decide whether they are interested in hiring me or not.  This would be similar to an indicator of matching personalities; if the person likes the way I blog they may check out my clinic, if not they may choose to go elsewhere.  Possibly being the only blogger in California, or one of very few, some local clients may choose me as their therapist simply because I hold an active blog.  As a student, I feel that this blog is the first building step to my future as the occupational therapist I will become.

Slowly Zotero is becoming my new resource guide for research.  Being able to tag and refer back to all my sources is extremely helpful when completing a research paper.  A great article I tagged from the New York Times, written by Mike Stobbe, talks about the huge rise in children with autism in the United States.  I found this article very interesting because there are quotes from parents and their thoughts on the rise in diagnosed children with autism.  The rise in numbers is substantial, ten years ago the statistics were 1 in 10,000, and today the numbers are beyond 1 in 150 children.  According to this article the heave of diagnosed cases is largely due to categorization and how the disorder is currently being diagnosed.  What is most striking is the response of parents: one parent states, “I do have to admit I almost like the idea of having the autistic label, at least over the other labels, because there’s more help out there for you”.  With the word services this mother is referring to occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, speech therapy, etc.  How heartbreaking it is to think that a parent would want a label on their child just for the benefit of services.  I cannot believe that this is what the world of special needs is coming to.  I hope that by the time I am an actual OT, the services will be more accessible for all sorts of disabilities, giving me the opportunity to help many patients and steer away from parent wanting their child labeled to acquire my services.