OCU’s new Doctor of Physical Therapy program celebrated National Physical Therapy Month during October and is continuing to raise awareness of physical therapy.
Dr. Maria Jones, founding director of the physical therapy program, led the celebration alongside her new physical therapy students to provide information and raise awareness about physical therapists. Jones joined OCU’s faculty in January of 2017, but the physical therapy program began this year. Jones welcomed the program’s first group of students in June.
Jones said physical therapy has a place in everyone’s life, even in the basic activities people do, like going to class or going to work.
“We can go in and analyze the way somebody moves. That can be how they do their job at work in terms of working at their posture and their balance and those sorts of things to improve how their workstation’s set up,” she said.
Jones said people should pay more attention to how they’re sitting now that Zoom classes have become a new normal.
“We also want to be making sure in this Zoom world that we’re in right now, that we’re being conscientious about what our posture looks like when we’re on Zoom calls, or if we’ve been sitting at a computer, which we have a tendency to round our shoulders and slump down, to make sure that we’re paying attention to what that does and how that affects our movement, especially when we’re doing it over the long term,” she said.
Although national physical therapy month already ended, Jones said there are ways students can access this information and learn more about what physical therapists do.
“If they’re interested, they can actually contact our department,” Jones said. “We have several handouts that we can give them in terms of assessing their physical fitness.”
Keith Walton, physical therapy graduate, said physical therapy is important for many reasons, one of which is the prevention of health concerns.
“There’s so many diseases and conditions that we can really prevent as humans by just staying active or incorporating an exercise program into your daily life, so we really just want to preach about the prevention side of it. As we move to a doctoral profession, it brightens our scope of what we can do and how we can help the community even more than what we could in the past,” Walton said.
Walton said physical therapists can help people in more ways than just physically.
“Yes, we treat with exercise or we treat with manual therapy, but we can also help give patients emotional support. All these different aspects are things that make us who we are. We are being trained to recognize and see deficits in different areas, and we’re trained to know what to say or do to help people get to where they should be, and if it’s out of our scope of practice, we refer our patients to different healthcare providers,” Walton said.
Molly Pearson, physical therapy graduate, said physical therapy can improve quality of life.
“It’s about using the knowledge of physical therapy to improve the overall quality of life. We use our connections throughout the health care field. We can do screens. We can refer out to other physicians. We can talk with your primary care provider and be in touch with them and provide a good network to keep the patient healthy in all aspects,” Pearson said.
Pearson said incorporating physicality into your life can help with more than just your body.
“As a student, you spend a ton of time sitting and studying; it can be incredibly stressful. You can become exhausted, so it’s just really important to stay active, even if it’s just walking, because it can help reduce serotonin levels and help detox your mind and reset,” Pearson said.
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