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Occupational Therapy (OTA)

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I am currently getting my bachelor’s degree in exercise science with an emphasis in physical education. Eventually, I want to go into occupational therapy (OT) as an occupational therapy assistant (OTA). OT involves helping people of all ages participate in everyday activities. The assistant is the one who works one on one with the patients instead of administrative work (“About Occupational Therapy, 2017). I felt that an exercise science major coincided with well with OT since it fulfilled a lot of the prerequisites. Kinesiology was one class that caught my eye. I did not really know what kinesiology was or what the class would entail. Throughout the course of the semester, I learned that what we learned and did in class closely relates to …show more content…

These joints would include the shoulder, elbow, wrist/hand, hip/pelvis, knee, ankle/foot, and spine. Movements at these joints could be flexion, extension, internal/external rotation, abduction, adduction, pronation, supination, inversion, eversion, etc. (Floyd, 2015). OTAs often use goniometers when evaluating their patients for the first time as well as throughout the course of treatment to see improvement. Already having a knowledge of this going into OT school will help me a ton. Next, OTAs perform manual muscle tests (MMT) on their patients as well. This also is done during an evaluation and for improvement. It gives them a baseline to work with to see what the patient’s strengths and weaknesses are (“About Occupational Therapy, 2017). Some of the MMT we did in lab were shoulder flexion, elbow extension, hip internal rotation, knee extension, foot plantar flexion, and lumbar side bending (Floyd, 2015). These could be used by an OTA for people of all ages. Finally, learning the origin, insertion, and action of the muscles of the body will help with understanding what could be wrong with a patient. If they have weakness doing an exercise or task, having this knowledge will help determine what muscle deficiency or weakness they may have (“About Occupational Therapy,

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