What is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational Therapy (OT) is a profession that works with people across the lifespan to address personalized goals in order to help individuals complete the activities they need and want to do in their daily life; activities that occupy our time are otherwise known as occupations.
That is the umbrella definition of OT, and if it feels broad, that’s because it is! It’s also one of the reasons I love the profession so much! Being an OT has allowed me to specialize in both geriatrics (older adults) and pediatrics (children), and I can’t think of many other careers that enable you to help people of such varying ages engage in the activities that are meaningful to them.
Sometimes the running joke among OTs is that we can have dozens of different careers in our professional lives, just because of the wide knowledge base we have as OTs that allows us to work with such a wide variety of people. As OTs, we are trained in something called activity analysis, which means we are able to analyze different activities, and break them down to determine which parts of the activity might need some assistance. The ability to analyze and break down activities to identify barriers to optimal performance and engagement in a task allows us to help people make the necessary changes in order to reach their goals for each specific activity.
If this still sounds gray to you, let me explain my personal journey as an occupational therapist thus far in my career… I graduated with my Master of Science in Occupational Therapy from Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine in 2018. My first job out of grad school was working with older adults in their homes, helping them maintain the strength, flexibility, and mobility necessary to age in place (in their homes, or preferred housing locations), and maintain their independence with their daily responsibilities. Sometimes this looked like helping a woman in her 70s recover from a shoulder surgery by teaching her energy conservation techniques to manage her fatigue, finding alternative ways to get herself dressed and complete household chores while adhering to her surgery precautions, and rebuilding strength in her upper extremities. Other times it looked like helping a man in his 90s navigate around his environment now that his physical abilities were declining. No two days were the same - which is yet another cool thing about OT!
My next “career” as an OT was in pediatrics, which I also loved! As a pediatric OT, I got to help little humans learn through their main occupation: play. Through play-based tasks, I helped children build strength and coordination, develop their fine and gross motor skills, regulate their emotions, process the information coming through their eight senses (yes, 8!), develop executive functioning skills and problem-solving abilities, and more! I loved working with kids and watching them develop the confidence required to find success in their daily responsibilities and preferred activities.
Now, as I transition into non-clinical practice, it is still my goal to help as many people as possible reach their goals, but now I have more flexibility to work with people in the area that brings me the most joy - nutrition! Nutrition forms the foundation for optimal engagement in all other occupations, and I am extremely excited to work with individuals to form a solid foundation that will provide them with the proper nourishment required for successful attainment of their goals and completion of their meaningful activities.
I hope you learned something about OT from this post! Thank you for reading about my journey!
