Week 17: Sports Med

This week once again, we had a couple of really amazing guest speakers! We had Alli Thompson (PT at KU) and Brian Mills (OT at Ku) come and talk to us about their specialties and what they do. Alli is an outpatient physical therapist, so one of the things she focused on with us was one of the functional test outs they do at her clinic an order for an athlete to return to play after an injury. We focused on an ankle injury. I have never had an intense injury, so I had no idea about how intense the test outs were for most injuries; at KU anyways. The ankle functional test consists of eight different functional tests that the athlete has to get 90% or higher of full ROM and strength. Let me tell you, most of us could barely do this test without recovering from an ankle injury! It was so fun though to learn about and then getting to actually do it ourselves to see how difficult it was.

Brian then talked to us about all the different modalities his uses in his type of therapy. I learned that sports related occupational therapists focus on the hand, wrist, and elbow and then the physical therapist focuses on everything else. Some of the modalities he talked to us about were an ultrasound, phonophoresis, electrical stimulation (E-Stim), ice/vasopneumatic, heat treatment, light therapy (laser), kinesiotaping, cupping, and lastly dry needling. Obviously I already knew about a lot of these therapies because of being an athlete my whole life, but I definitely learned about so many new ones I hasn't heard of and also extra tips and tricks about the therapies I had already done before.