What Techniques and Tools Do Occupational Therapists Use?: Irvin: Resilience Occupational Therapy
What tools and techniques do occupational therapists use? Occupational therapists can use a variety of tools and techniques, whatever helps them help their clients get to their fullest level of function and get through their meaningful activities. This can mean anything from kinesiotaping and activity pacing coaching, as well as postural recommendations, exercises,
range of motion stretches, specific tasks to do and frequency of those tasks. Manual therapy can be used by occupational therapists, isn't a lot of the time, but manual therapy and massage type techniques are things that I use in my practice quite a bit. The variety of things that an occupational therapist
can do is quite great. Anything dealing with sensory integration things, making sure the environment is conducive for you be able to get the activities you need done, working with adaptive equipment. The limitation really is as long as it's not medical devices that occupational therapists are not qualified to use. An occupational therapist can pretty much have the latitude
to use whatever tools are necessary to help someone engage in their meaningful activities. For me personally, I focus quite a bit on posture. I do do some kinesiotaping. I do do some exercises. I do quite a bit of manual therapy and massage type techniques. I do a lot of activity pacing and just helping people with recovery and understanding what's a natural recovery for.
what's going on for their specific condition and what, and what that setbacks don't mean that everything has to start back from scratch. Additionally, I do a lot of education around pain neuroscience education and how the nervous system actually works. And just by learning that people can often have improvements in their pain and their function. So I use whatever techniques are
and tools are important. have specific types of weights and resistance bands that I might use as well as specific elastic things for strengthening your wrists. I'll give out foot exercises as needed. Give people different understanding about how the brain works and how to help them break out of some of their old behavioral patterns that they might be getting the way of being able to incorporate home exercise
programs and rehab from their pain and restrictions.